


The Way Out Is The Way Back

by unconscious



Series: endgame [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, really just a hell of a lot of processing, superheroes processing their feelings through manual labor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-08 08:58:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18891376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unconscious/pseuds/unconscious
Summary: Sometimes Bucky feels inconceivably old. A soldier’s body is a miracle. His is, in a way, a terrible frightening cyborgian way. What staggering odds that a thrice-resurrected man and a man brimming with irrepressible life would find each other like this. These feelings, he thought his body had forgotten them. That they had died with his heart.If there’s one truth about Bucky’s overlong, pain-ridden, sometimes heartbreakingly lucky life it’s this: Nothing about him ever really dies.After Steve leaves, Bucky and Sam try to pick up the pieces.





	1. not without you

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place directly after the events of [time crawling to a slow end](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18665092).

_One could say that in the world of the soul everything occurs in present tense._

* * *

The expanse of a life without Steve stretches before Bucky like he is swaying on the edge of an icy crevasse. The world in its elegant impersonal cruelty continues to spin. Where is he supposed go? What is he meant to do now? To whom is he to report?

What Steve told him sits rotting in his mind. The knowledge feels uncomfortable, wrong, private. For his own safety, and the safety of his mission, he needs to un-know it.

Oh, Bucky realizes dully, he wants to be wiped. That pain and that emptiness is preferable to this pain, this emptiness. The Asset - without mind, but with heart that sluiced molten through the years of concerted erasure when Steve spoke his name. But this - what is he now? Mind intact but heart dissolved? What kind of life awaits him now?

He gazes out over the lake. He wonders how much weight he would need to override his programming and keep his body underwater long enough to drown. For all the skill of the Wakandan doctors, the body remembers. The violent ghost still lives in the ripcord strength of his muscles and his unnaturally quiet gait. A tin soldier.

“Heyo,” Sam calls, approaching Bucky intentionally noisily, stomping and carousing through the fallen leaves. “I just got off the phone with my sister. She’s pissed I haven’t come back since the whole un-Vanishing thing even though it’s only been like, four days, and we had to deal with … this. But she’s been keeping an eye on my place, so I’m gonna go there and take some damn time off.’

“Understood."

Sam doesn’t turn to go. Bucky doesn’t look towards him. No reason to watch another friend leave. He could solder his arm to one of Stark’s cars and then get in the lake. It’s not like Stark will be using them.

“Well, chop chop, Underground Man,” Sam says. “You’re coming with, right?”

 

The drive from the Stark’s Ithaca lake house to DC is six hours - long enough for Bucky to get antsy and Sam to get chatty.

“So, where’s your stuff at? Brooklyn? DC?”

“Wakanda,” Bucky says. “On a goat farm. If it’s still there.”

Sam starts scrolling through his phone, eyes flicking between the highway and the screen.

“Can you focus on driving,” Bucky says.

“I’m trying to think of someone who knows someone in Wakanda who wasn’t Vanished,” Sam says. “I’m not gonna call someone who just got un-Vanished to talk logistics.”

“I think that’s all anyone is doing,” Bucky says. “Give me your phone. Are you capable of speaking and driving.”

“Pretty sure I was in a car that you ripped the steering wheel out of, and now you’re all about ten and two."

да, Bucky thinks. Steve was in the car. Romanoff was in the car. He can almost feel the humidity of his steady breath in the mask.

He calls Shuri. Her voice is firm yet soothing in his ear. She calls him Sergeant still, asks him how he is. She says, yes, of course they can arrange to have his things sent to DC. Thank god for Wakandan efficiency. He hands off the phone to Sam so Sam can arrange logistics with Shuri’s staff. And he stares out the window.

Eventually Sam asks, “So, wanna talk about it?”

“Нет,” Bucky says.

It’s like blood loss. The wound is so deep and putrid and gushing that he feels nothing. A gut wound, a slow, gurgling death.

“Cool,” Sam says, and turns on the radio.

 

A few hours later, signs appear for Virginia. “All right,” Sam says, glancing over at Bucky, who is leaning against the window of the passenger seat letting the car’s vibrations numb his mind. Bucky looks up, blinking the unfocused haze out of his eyes. “My sister’s place is on the way, so we gotta stop by.”

It’s early evening when Sam pulls into the driveway of Darlene Wilson’s small ranch-style house in Northern Virginia, just outside of DC proper. He honks a few times like an asshole before he climbs out of the car. A woman who looks barely younger than Sam opens the door, her hair in long box braids pulled into a ponytail, swimming in a ratty Air Force sweatshirt, and stands on the wide front porch with her hands clapped over her mouth and her hazel eyes welling with tears.

“Hey, boss,” Sam says. “Miss me?”

Darlene explodes into tears and leaps down the stairs to envelop Sam in a hug. “I knew it,” she says, her voice muffled into Sam’s shoulder, “I knew the Avengers would figure something out. I knew it wouldn’t be forever.”

Sam holds her shaking figure gently, easily - the same way he’d held Bucky just hours before. “You’re crazy sitting on that property for five years. Should’ve ditched it and bought a yacht.”

Darlene barks a surprised laugh, pulling back to look at Sam’s face, and Bucky can see the Wilson resemblance and the aging effects of grief. “No one would’ve wanted to buy that rat trap anyway,” she says.

“I’m not caught up on the world yet,” Sam says, “But what’s new with you?”

She’s laughing and crying simultaneously as she waves them towards the house. Bucky lingers by the car.

“Come on, man,” Sam says. “Quick bite, then we’re back on the road.”

“Such a nice suit, Sammy, shame you’re still a freeloader.”

Bucky steps forward then, tentatively.

“Darlene, this is Sergeant James Barnes,” Sam says.

“Bucky.” He offers his hand.

Darlene takes it in both of her own. “Happy to meet you,” she says. Her eyes track his face and she sees something - or the lack of it. She glances towards Sam who presses his lips together but says nothing.

“Sam got a promotion,” Bucky says. “Now he’s the star-spangled man with a plan.”

The Wilsons have a conversation with their eyes. Part of Bucky’s consciousness is pulling desperately at his brain, trying to escape, trying to be anywhere other than this world right now between two people who care about him but can’t know or understand the depths of his emptiness. Worse than having his arm cleaved off, this gurgling loss. He is struck with the sudden urge to run, melt into the landscape, find a mission, a handler. To find solace in the simplicity of violence.

Sam must see his eyes go flat, because he places a steadying hand on Bucky’s shoulder and guides him towards the house.

 

Darlene herds him onto the couch in the living room, a lovely welcoming plush space with low light and the faint smell of lavender candles. Both Wilsons slip into the next room, and then Darlene returns with a mug she pushes into Bucky’s hands, stammering something about it being too late for coffee even though his metabolism is probably different but she didn’t want to risk keeping him awake so instead, here’s this, and the smell of hot chocolate is stomach-turningly rich and luxurious.

Sugar and dairy. For as bad as he wants it - when was the last time? - Brooklyn? Before he shipped out? Christmas? - he sets it on the coffee table and lets it steam. There’s a memory somewhere threatening to break the surface.

In the kitchen, the Wilsons are whisper-fighting. Despite everything there’s a sweetness to the domesticity that makes Bucky stay on the couch. Unfortunately whispering is pointless when one’s hearing is enhanced.

“You could just stay here.”

“Dee, it’s not that simple. This can’t wait. He needs help, my help, now.”

“That’s what I mean. You can both stay here. It’s close to DC. Just stay, Sam, it’s been five years.”

A sigh. Bucky imagines Sam rubbing his hand across his forehead like he does when he’s exasperated or overwhelmed.

“He needs you, huh?” Darlene continues. “What about me? What if I need you?”

“Come on, don’t do that.”

Pause for tears. Voices even quieter now.

“I can’t have the damn Winter Soldier in your house, Dee. He’s my friend. But it’s not safe. I’ve been on the receiving end of that before.”

“But it’s safe for you, then?”

“Hell, no, it’s not. But I’m a superhero now, remember?”

“Don’t get cute with me. Sam, what happened to Steve? Was he kidding about the ‘promotion’?”

A longer pause. Rattling around the kitchen. Pacing, getting out dishes. Bucky is clenching his fist so tight his arm hums and adjusts its density as if anticipating a strike.

“It’s hard to explain. A lot happened.”

“Do you think I won’t understand? Will you be straight up with me? What are you doing with him? What happened to Steve?”

“Dee--”

“You know what I was doing during these five years? The school got hit hard. Lots of kids gone - more than half. So my teaching load got a lot lighter.” She sniffs. “So I filled in your job at the VA. Helping people who had already lost so much. And then they lost more. So don’t talk to me like I can’t understand just because I don’t have a big ugly bird costume.”

“It’s not ugly!”

Oven creaks open, smell of casserole.

Sam whispers, “It’s not my story to tell, Dee, so I can’t tell you everything. But - Steve didn’t die. He chose to leave. To another … reality. Today. A few hours ago. And, I mean, after all Bucky has been through - this too?”

“Oh, God,” Darlene murmurs.

Sam and Darlene bring the entire casserole into the living room, with plates, and all three of them sit on the couch.

“Thanks for the cocoa,” Bucky says. “Sam, I am the Winter Soldier, and I have enhanced hearing. Just wanted to remind you.”

Darlene blanches. Sam throws his hands up in defeat. “Try to do a good thing, man.”

“He’s right, though,” Bucky says, fixing his eyes on Darlene, who looks at him with pain and fear and confusion. “I’m dangerous. Up here,” he taps his temple, “It’s all scrambled from being tortured. So I get confused. Disregulated. I could kill you on accident. Or at least do some damage to your house.”

“You threatening my sister?”

“I’m being honest. This was a mistake. I should go. Thanks again for the cocoa.”

“How are you gonna get anywhere? I drove you!”

“Bucky,” Darlene says, “Stay here. Eat. Go with Sam. Give it a few days before you make any rash decisions, okay?”

A vague sense of relief washes over him. He sits. He eats the casserole. Half an hour later Sam pulls the car off the highway so he can throw it all up.

 

“Home sweet home,” Sam says, shouldering the door open to his row house in Kingman Park. Sixteenth St is substantially potholed, and weeds grow in the sidewalk, but there are people who walk about in various dazes. The houses are standing, and the small yards are overgrown lush with untended gardens and untrimmed trees. 

Inside Sam’s house, the furniture is covered, and the air is still but not stale - the air conditioning works, which means Darlene had been paying the bills all these years. The blinds are drawn and the baseboards dotted with vermin traps. Upstairs, the beds are stripped of their linens and the clothes neatly packed away in hanging laundry bags. No open toiletries in the bathrooms, just a few sealed necessities tucked away.

“Hey man, come down here!”

Bucky returns downstairs. Sam is on the floor of the kitchen. “She unplugged the damn fridge, help me move it.”

Bucky waves him aside and pulls the fridge away from the wall one-handed.

“Show-off,” Sam says.

“No, efficient,” Bucky says. He plugs the fridge in. It hums to life as he pushes it back into place.

Sam leans back against the counter, watching as Bucky fiddles with the placement of the fridge until it’s flush against the wall, back where it was. Bucky turns the dial inside down to cold, but not all the way down.

“Thanks,” Sam says, quietly.

“She packed up all your clothes in laundry bags,” Bucky says. “With cedar and lavender in the bags. She really believed you’d be back.”

“God bless her, then,” Sam says, “I’m dying to get out of this suit. Come on, I’ll let you borrow something.”

Sam makes up his own bed, humming to himself, and then enters the second bedroom as Bucky is finishing casing the room for bugs. Sam says nothing about it, just offers him sheets, which Bucky does not put on the bed, and a pair of sweatpants and an old t-shirt, which he does change into. Then, barefoot, he checks the perimeter. Then he checks the rest of the house for bugs. Throughout this process Sam says nothing, just continues piecing his house back together, uncovering the furniture, plugging in lights, vacuuming accumulated dust and straightening the pictures of his family and friends that dot the walls.

“Perimeter secure,” Bucky says.

“Cool.” Sam takes the kettle off the stove just before it boils. “I found some chamomile tea in the cabinet. Tea doesn’t go bad.”

“Okay. Now what?”

The question deflates Sam. He has two mugs of tea on the counter and he watches them steep. The exhaustion is apparent in the slump of Sam’s shoulders, the pallor to his face. The exhausting rituals of grief. Then of course the physical beating his body took in the war, the bruises and the abrasions, the surface-level wounds not worth wasting Wakandan resources for, but still bad enough to hurt. Only in seeing it on Sam does Bucky notice then his own exhaustion - his heart speedily pumping to keep him awake, his muscles crying out in soreness and stiffness. He feels tired. Tired to his bones, a permanent kind of tired. He feels like he felt after a long day at the docks, the kind of work day hauling crates and pallets that makes a man think he needs a drink or five, the kind of day that left him stumbling into his apartment late, too late, and collapsing into the twin bed and pulling Steve close to him - he ends the thought. He wrenches his attention away from the past. Instead he fixes his eyes on Sam. Sam in his grey t-shirt too tight around his arms and shoulders, his bare feet on the dusty kitchen floor, the pensive furrow in his brow as he feels Bucky’s eyes on him. The tea steaming on the counter, the big plush couch, the empty curtain rods. This is where his body is now. He is in this reality. With Sam. He wrestles his mind into blankness.

“Saved the world,” Sam says. “Now what? Watch a movie?”

Bucky watches him.

“Do you think you can get some sleep?”

Bucky flicks his eyes towards the staircase as he thinks. It’s possible. He hasn’t needed his meds since the battle. But that was before today. He nods anyway.

 

He awakes in a drafty apartment, in a twin bed, with the rotten smell of the Gowanus Canal in his nose. The early morning noise of Brooklyn filters in - papers hitting stoops, kids shouting, trucks rumbling down the road.

His feet hit the floor silently. He has - a shift? Somewhere? So he gets dressed.

He leaves the room. Turns back and re-enters. Now there’s a body in the twin bed. Approaches it. Turns down the cover. Captain America. You’re my mission.

The room is high above the river now and the air whips his hair around his face and Steve’s face is bloodied under his hands.

Rage rips through the body like a fire. But - why?

The arm whirs its gears and grips Steve’s neck and squeezes. As Steve’s windpipe is slowly crushed Bucky watches as he ages rapidly, from boy to man to hero to grief-stricken shell to happy married man to old man. Old man reaching his soft hand up to Bucky’s cheek.

Pain cuts through his consciousness and Bucky is awake.

He stumbles backwards, breathing heavily. A long, shallow cut on his cheek bleeds into the neckline of his t-shirt. His legs give out as his back slams into the wall of Sam’s bedroom and he sinks down to the floor. Sam is coughing wildly, one hand rubbing the inflamed skin of his neck, his other hand gripping the hilt of a surprisingly large tactical knife.

Sam coughs and coughs.

“Sam,” Bucky says, and slowly he knee-walks his way to the edge of the bed, because he doesn’t want to scare him, people tell him the way he moves, walks, talks, exists, is scary - “I--”

“Bad dream?” Sam asks, cutting him off, his voice gravelly.

Bucky tips his head forward until it touches the mattress.

“Most vets just wake up screaming,” Sam says. “That’s what I do, at least.”

“That’s not good for multi-day stealth missions,” Bucky says.

“Neither is attacking your comrades in their sleep.”

“I started doing that … after.”

He feels Sam’s hand touch his head gently, smoothing his hair, his thumb making a gentle circle on his temple.

“Well, I sure as hell ain’t getting back to sleep,” Sam says. He sits up and places a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky stares at the floor. “Let me clean that cut and let’s watch that movie, yeah?”

“Okay,” Bucky says. “Also. That is a good knife.”

Sam smiles. “It was my friend’s. I’m taking it downstairs. But just because I gotta wash it before I put it back.”

“You always have a knife under your pillow?”

“For now? Yeah.”

“Good.”

In the bathroom Bucky keeps his eyes closed as Sam swipes an alcohol-soaked cotton ball across the long, shallow cut. He lets Sam follow that with antibacterial goo, even though he can feel the skin stitching itself together already. Downstairs, halfway through a nature documentary, Bucky works up the nerve to mention the meds to Sam, who squawks in disbelief and frustration, and then they wrestle over the phone until Sam gets his hands on it and texts Shuri to upgrade the shipping to super-expensive-fast.

 

The next day a sleek, nondescript drone appears outside the house, and Bucky’s fingers itch for handgun to keep trained on it. It deposits a package on their porch and then hums away.

“That your stuff?” Sam says, blearily. It’s early, and he’s suspiciously smelling the inside of a Folgers can. 

“Unknown,” Bucky says.

Sam moves out of the kitchen and towards the front door.

Bucky grabs his wrist before he opens the door. “Sam--”

Sam gently removes Bucky’s hand from his wrist. In the light of day the ring of bruises around Sam’s neck are turning rich shades of purple and blue. “Bucky,” Sam says, so gently, his dark eyes soft. “The war’s over now. We are expecting this package.”

Bucky’s phone buzzes with a text. He glances at where it sits on the coffee table. It’s Shuri. He can’t make out the words but he can see a string of emoji.

“Can I bring it inside?”

Bucky lets go. Sam brings the package inside. Bucky insists on opening it with his back to Sam just in case it’s rigged with explosives. 

Inside are all his things from Wakanda. There’s so few. His life was so small. A few outfits of Wakandan linen, a few pairs of American jeans and shirts. His meds. A dog-eared copy of a Wilfred Owen book. A ratty backpack. And the thin, worn notebook he carried with him across Europe as he tried to piece together the scraps of his pitiful life.

“Aight, I’m risking it with this coffee,” Sam declares from the kitchen. “You want some?”

“Yes,” Bucky says.

“They send you anything fun?” Sam asks. Bucky hums as he turns the book of poetry over in his hands. Sam, so skillfully probing, trying to get Bucky to open up, but leaving him enough space to close the door.

“A book,” he says, holding it up towards the kitchen. “I bought it in… Prague. And my notebook.”

“Your notebook?”

“When I was … on the lam, I guess. Trying to figure out who I was then… what I am now. What I’ve done. Hard to keep it all straight in my head. So I wrote a lot of things down. Lists. Things I could eat. Things that made me sick. Mission reports that played on repeat in my head. People in cities who were kind to me. Or places where everyone was scared of me.”

“Things you’ve done,” Sam hums. “What about things that were done to you?”

So much killing. To consider himself victimized is to spit on the graves of all the lives he destroyed. “The funny thing is,” Bucky says, “For all the wipes and the programming, they gave me a good memory. I know most of these poems. Memorized them on accident.”

Sam brings two cups of coffee into the living room and sets Bucky’s down. “Now, I’m not trying to get in your business, but that might not be Hydra. When Steve and I were looking for you, he talked about you a lot, especially about when you were in the Commandos. Probably knew I’d relate to that most. He said you were a damn jukebox. Could hear a song once and sing it back word for word.”

Bucky looks up at Sam with a furrowed brow, but he doesn’t tell him to stop.

“Said you drove him crazy with George Formby,” Sam continues. “But then it got in his head and so he started driving me crazy with it. ‘It serves you right,’ I think?’”

Bucky’s eyes widen slightly. The tune bubbles out of him like the casserole did, a bit flat, but with a bit of Cockney flair nonetheless.

_And it's no use kicking up a row, because you’re nobody's sweetheart now_  
_You can weep and sigh and pipe your eye but still you’re in the fight_  
_It serves you right, you shouldn't have joined! It jolly well serves you right._

He feels like he’s possessed. “It’s from… Bell-Bottom George. Silly British war movie. About a waiter who joins the navy. We weren’t in the war yet but we knew it was coming. We went to see it at the Little Carnegie. It was almost Christmas. Snowing. The Little Carnegie was right by Central Park. I remember all the snow. Steve stuffing his jacket with newspapers to stay warm because he knew I would want to throw snowballs in the park after the movie. Get some energy out… eat a baked potato for dinner ‘cause we spent all our money on the movie. It was worth it, though. Made us laugh.”

“Yeah, the good memory’s you, not them,” Sam says, grinning, then sips his coffee and sputters in disgust. “That song’s better than _Gory Gory_ , at least.” Bucky doesn’t touch the notebook and Sam doesn’t ask about it.

Later that day, a red and gold drone appears at the door.

“Sam,” Bucky says, “Are you expecting another delivery?”

“No,” Sam says, warily, laying Bucky's Wilfred Owen book down.

The drone hovers at the door. “Requesting identity authorization,” the drone says.

“Sounds like Stark’s gear,” Sam says, and gets up.

“Stop,” Bucky says.

Sam stops. Bucky opens the door.

“Requesting identity authorization,” the drone repeats, and scans Bucky’s body. “Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. Requesting voice authorization.”

“... Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes,” Bucky repeats back, his whole body tense, his metal arm angled forward slightly to catch any bullets or other attacks.

“Identity confirmed,” the drone says. Then it reveals a small screen and Pepper Potts appears. “Sergeant Barnes,” she says, her voice very quiet and tired, her hair dull and listless around her aging face, so unlike the sharp and unflappable woman he’d met those few times. “I’m recording this from the lake house. I don’t plan on returning to New York or DC anytime in the near future, so I’ve asked the staff at the Avengers facility to clean up some. There wasn’t much in Steve’s quarters, but I thought you might like to have it. I thought… I would’ve wanted to have Tony’s. So. If this was presumptuous, just tell the drone to return to sender.” On the video, she pauses, and then sighs, her eyes softening. “Take care of yourself, Sergeant.”

The video ends. The drone deposits a package.

“Confirm acceptance or rejection,” the drone requests.

“Um,” Bucky says. “Accepted.”

“Confirmed,” the drone says, and then it’s up and gone, just as quickly as it arrived.

The package is small and nondescript. Not much inside - a few shirts. A sketchbook. An iPod. A straight razor. Hair product - which makes Bucky huff a laugh. The white henley is soft on his hands when he picks it up, well-worn. It smells like Steve, like sweat and Barbasol, leather and metal. Bucky sits down hard on the couch. The sketchbook is only maybe a third full - little doodles, jotted notes. Messy sketches of Natasha and Sam. A cartoon version of Nick Fury holding the strings of a monkey marionette in a Captain America costume. Peggy old, Peggy young.

And countless sketches of Bucky. A beaming teenager, a brooding soldier, a wild-eyed killing machine, a goat farmer.

This is a package you get when your lover has died.

Not that they were lovers. Well - they are, but not here. Not in this reality. In a way Bucky thinks it would be easier if Steve had died. At least then he could grieve in a way he understands.

On day fifteen of Bucky’s self-imposed house arrest Sam knocks on the guest bedroom door and says, “All right, that’s enough. Get dressed and come with me to the VA. Darlene wants to see you.”

As Sam parks the car, Bucky tilts his baseball cap low over his face, tugging his glove tighter over his metal hand. “Sam - what if they recognize me.”

“That’s the great thing about the VA,” Sam says easily. “Confidentiality. If anyone recognizes you, it doesn’t matter. You’re just another vet.”

The room is small, but about fifteen people sit in a messy circle, some with paper cups of coffee, some with their heads in their hands. Sam joins, but says nothing when Bucky chooses to lurk near the doorway. Darlene smiles at him and opens the Vets (Vanished) support meeting.

At his turn, Sam sighs heavily and leans back in his chair.

“You know,” he says to the group, “After I lost my wingman I thought I had this grief thing all figured out. Like, that was it. That was the defining experience of loss in my life. Nothing could be worse than that, right?”

Murmurs of agreement.

“And I mean - y’all know I’m not trying to name drop, okay? Setting aside, you know, standard crazy alien battle trauma, which at this point anyone in a metropolitan area has, I just… I never considered loss as a possibility. My death, sure. Because I’m just a guy with a suit, and not in a fancy billionaire genius way. But those guys are supposed to be invincible. I figured I’d get out again, or die. And the big guys, the real heroes, would keep it going.

“It didn’t really hit me until I came home about two weeks ago. We had a couple funerals. One of them, I half expected her to reappear with a haircut and a new identity. But standing in my house I remembered the first time I really met them, talked to them. They showed up on my porch asking for help. And--” Sam’s voice breaks, and he pauses, gathers his thoughts. “There’s been so much death, and pain. And at the end of the day, they were successful. We’re all back. Battle fought and won. She died but he - well - I feel ungrateful. Hurting so much. I got better things to do. I don’t need space to grieve, right? Other people need it more. I’m trying to… learn again how to manage.

“And,” Sam says, and he looks up, and his eyes meet Bucky’s in the doorway, “I’m grateful I’m not having to do it alone.”

 

Bucky lingers in the hallway outside the room as the meeting winds down as Sam catches up with people known and unknown. Darlene finds him. She looks a little more well-rested and calm in a VA Volunteer t-shirt and jeans, her braids hanging long and loose to her waist.

“Thanks for coming,” she says. “What’d you think?”

“Sam asked me to come,” Bucky says.

“I know. I hope you’ll keep coming.”

The emptiness in Bucky’s chest feels on the verge of collapsing into itself. “I don’t know. I can’t talk about it. Any of it. He said he’s not alone but - he is. I’m - There’s nothing left. In me. When they took out the programming all I had left was what I was before the war. And now I don’t have that either.”

Darlene scoots a little closer to him, so they’re leaning against the wall shoulder-to-shoulder, and Bucky stares down at her sneakers. “But that’s what Sam means when he says he’s not alone. You know what it’s like to be defined by them. Steve, Natasha. For better and for worse. You knew them as people, Bucky. Same as Sam did. That’s what he needs from you. Shared experience. Confirmation that the past did happen. That his friends - who he worshipped, to a certain extent, which he’ll only admit as a joke - were people. People he’s allowed to mourn.”

How terrible, Bucky thinks. To go from having people to having this.

“He just wants you to be you,” Darlene says, and she touches his shoulder. “Whatever that you is. I can tell you it’s not nothing. You wouldn’t have come here if it was.”

“Okay,” Bucky says. “How have you been?”

Darlene laughs, surprised, and tells him about her students adjusting, both the left behind and the vanished, how the school is hiring more and more counselors, but it’s going well, she’s so busy. She needs more time for herself, to relax, she really needs to get her bike fixed, she misses her long early morning rides.

 

He keeps going to meetings occasionally, without Sam or Darlene there. He finds a group that meets at a weird time and there’s only four people and he can handle that.

In a meeting with four people he says, “I have nightmares.”

The other people say, “I do too.” A woman in the meeting, bald-headed, angular, watches him hawkishly. 

In another meeting he says, “I am afraid it’s inevitable I will revert to what I was during the war.”

The other people say, "I feel it inside me too."

In another meeting he says, "There is nothing about me that is not defined by death."

The other people say, "Maybe. But maybe not."

Afterwards, as everyone leaves, the bald woman stops him.

“I was in Afghanistan,” she says.

The room is very quiet and dim as the other move into the hallway to say goodbyes. Bucky keeps his eyes on the windows and the door in his eyeline. The woman is taller than him, muscular, wearing simple dark clothes that make her seem as if she is mission-ready. 

“I worked as an EMT afterwards,” she continues. “I was there when the three SHIELD helicarriers went down.”

Bucky’s heart pounds in his chest, his knees loosen and his muscles tense like his body is ready to spring into a sprint. “I’ll find a different group,” he says. “Or just - not - I’m sorry.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m Gabi Ramirez. I just wanted to introduce myself. And say I hope you’ll keep coming, and that you don’t feel like you need to… I don’t, hide anything?”

“So everyone knows?”

“Dude, I joined the Marines partially because of the Cap propaganda. People know your face around here.”

“Oh. Oo-rah.”

“It can be weird, getting into this shit.” Gabi shrugs, scratches her arm. “Do you want to grab a beer, or a coffee?”

He imagines sitting and laughing over a couple beers with this woman who pulled bodies out of the Potomac same as he did. It makes his stomach turn. “I - I would but -”

“Not right now,” she finishes for him with an understanding grin. “What, a post-sharing Marine ambush doesn’t put you at ease? Will I see you next week?”

Bucky supposes she will.

 

He sends thank you messages to Shuri and Pepper. Sam works at the VA and starts training with what’s left of the Avengers, but he always comes back to Kingman Park. He receives a letter from Wanda with a Missouri postmark - from Barton’s homestead.

_James,_ it reads, in her narrow handwriting,

_After everything that has happened I hope you are taking care of yourself. Admittedly peacetime can be harder than wartime, at least for me, though there’s always plenty to do on the farm. I am writing in hopes that you will remember me in the inevitable dark times. My brother and I were Hydra experiments for many years. And after his death I too felt the losses of the war. Lives like ours can be lonely. I believe we could be friends._

Bucky can’t formulate a response. Instead he tucks the letter in a drawer.

 

Two months after his first meeting, in early May, Sam has plans to eat dinner with Darlene, and Bucky asks him to bring back her bike.

He wants to do this. He can do this. This is something good and kind he can do for someone else because of the skills he has gained during his life as the Asset. He knows how bikes work, the intricacies of their engines and the easy balance of them, the sleekness, the power, he knows how to make them silent, or make them sturdy, or make them faster, he can ride them, and ditch them, or stop them as they barrel towards him. He can use one as a projectile. He can slam a car into a tree while on one. He can leave one in the road while he approaches the car and pulls the driver into the street, the driver who calls him Sergeant.

He turns the bathroom sink on cold and sticks his face beneath it.

The water shocks away the memory. Then he takes his deep centering breaths. The body settles.

“Hey, Underground!” Sam calls from downstairs. “I hear you pacing!”

He descends the stairs. His footsteps are light but his body is poised. “где мотоцикл?”

Sam balks when he sees him, putting his hands up defensively. “Whoa there, what is going on?”

“You call me that, тогда я говорю по русски. Where is the bike?”

“What happened, Buck? What’s going on?”

“Don’t call me that, either,” he spits.

“I’m sorry, man, come on, talk to me.” They’re in the living room now, Bucky standing stock-still, shoulders square, chin tilted down slightly. And Sam blocks the front door, holding a hand out as if he could calm him like wild animal.

Bucky is splitting apart. He is filled with rage and terror. Rage that these are his skills, that this is all he is good for. Terror that he will take Sam apart if he doesn’t get out of the way.

“Look, it’s right outside. It’s on my car. You can come look at it.”

Bucky shoulders Sam out of the way.

It’s not a motorcycle.

It’s a twenty-one geared road bicycle.

Bucky deflates.

“See? Bike’s here. All good. Will you come inside? What set you off?”

“I thought she meant motorcycle,” Bucky says. “I know… a lot about motorcycles. And cars. All engines. In case I needed to - steal. Or fix. In the field.”

Sam ushers Bucky back into the house and waits.

“I know how to do it. She needed it done. I should apply my skills,” Bucky says. 

“Why?” Sam asks.

Because it’s something good. Like if he can just reframe these curses, these muscle memory skills that continue to appear in mundane activities and shock him with their terrible efficiency and delicacy, if he can just somehow integrate them into a regular life, the machine can become a person. But it is impossible to explain that to Sam whose dark eyes bore into him, whose mouth twists with concern. So he says nothing. 

The conversation at the lake house lurks in Bucky’s memory, like a stench, like something rotting in his mind. _Too deep,_ Steve had said. _In my timeline, I found you before Hydra got too deep._

Meaning there was time, during his years as the Soldier, in which he was worth staying for. Worth saving. That he was not so fully transformed into the monstrosity he was now. The bloodied, brutal, unthinking, unremorseful Asset. His memory full of killings so extensive and unremarkable it is as if he is remembering each laundry day of his pre-war life. There is no redemption for the inhuman, simply atonement; atone, atone, atone, then die, and then feel nothing, hopefully, or, possibly, hell. But to cut it short himself would be an undeserved luxury. The tendrils of Hydra wrapped around his bones, as part of him as the arm.

“Steve told me in his timeline, he found me soon, before Hydra got too deep, he said. He found a version of me that was still a person. Not this. Not a - product of programming.”

They’re standing across the living room from each other. Sam crosses his arms over his chest, then realizes he’s doing it, and drops them. “What are you saying, man?”

“In his world,” Bucky says, grimacing at the floor, “He found me. A better me, a me worth saving! Worth sticking around for! Why come back?”

“Tell me what he said,” Sam says. “Don’t editorialize. Just tell me.”

Suddenly Bucky feels exposed and fearful under Sam’s careful focused eyes. Like he’s been hiding a dying creature in his bedroom and is about to reveal it. “He told me about the 50s and 60s. He said he got himself out of the ice. And started the Avengers. And he said he… got me back. Before Hydra got too deep.”

“And you think that means... what?”

Bucky says nothing.

"That you're not good enough as you are?"

He risks a slight nod.

"You really think that’s why he didn’t come back?”

He starts casing the room for exits.

“I thought you knew Steve better than anyone,” Sam continues, firmly. “He told you he found himself - because he knew where he crashed the plane, so that one’s easy - and then he immediately found you.”

“...Yes.”

“Bucky, man, it sounds to me like he wanted you to know that even though he stayed in that timeline, you were still a priority.

"If you were Steve, and you saw a version of you get to grow up like the both of you were supposed to, without all the fucked up evil shit that happened to you, wouldn’t you want to share that? Wouldn’t that be a bright spot that keeps you going? Especially if he regretted leaving, or had doubts. Despite any fuck ups, he’s probably thinking, at least Bucky got the life he deserved.”

“I didn’t, though. I got this life. Someone else got that one.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, and his shoulders slump under a heavy exhale. “Yeah. I think Steve realized that too late.”

“So it doesn’t matter."

Sam looks exasperated now. “No, what I’m getting at, is what you did as the Soldier--”

“Don’t say it wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t gonna. Was just gonna say it makes you a casualty of torture. Steve left because he’s just as traumatized as the rest of us and wanted to, I don’t know, fix the entire world and escape it at the same time. War and grief lead to some bad decisions and his snowballed into an entirely different reality. We’re stuck in this one. You’re not the Winter Soldier. I’m for sure not Captain America. But here we are. So what are we gonna do?”

Breathlessly Bucky flees to his bedroom.

In the bathroom he stares at his reflection - he’s lost weight. He’s no longer the battle axe he was for so long. He looks leaner, like his pre-war self.

If he wasn’t irreversibly poisoned by Hydra, then what was he? The terrible spectre of possibility opens overhead like a rainstorm. Steve was always the one who had his head on straight, whose eyes would cut through the bullshit. Who had his morals fixed and always knew how to do the right thing. His decision-making had always had an element of martyrdom to it, but it was always in service of some planned bettering of the world, even if Bucky couldn’t quite see how.

At the lake Steve had told Bucky his leaving had been a mistake. In his own grief and anger Bucky had warped that sentiment into meaning - Steve felt guilty for having this other, better life of which Bucky was unworthy. Unworthy for how damaged, changed, so unlike the Bucky who pulled the couch cushions onto the floor of their shared apartment in 1939 to hold him close and warm him after pummeling him with snowballs in Central Park. Bucky’s distrust in himself became a belief that Steve was infallible.

The simple clarity of Sam’s interpretation cuts through the emptiness. What if Steve just wanted Bucky know that even in another timeline Steve sought him? Because he knew how Bucky had suffered and wanted to stop it?

Because he has.

He has suffered.

He kneels on the bathroom floor and presses his forehead to the cold tile.

His feelings unravel: confusion, despair, betrayal. Churning his guts like the sea. He stays still on the floor until the convulsions pass. God knows how long.

Then when he can focus again he storms back into the living room, where Sam is waiting patiently, thumbing through his phone. “Oh, hey.”

“How could he do that?” Bucky exclaims, in a show of emotion so volatile that it makes Sam start. “How could he go rescue some other person - some not-me - and leave me behind? Then tell me all about it like my life is over now too?”

“I have some ideas,” Sam says. “But what do you think?”

“I think,” Bucky says, furiously, the words boiling over in his mind, “I think he’s a fucking moron who didn’t realize he needed me. Needed us. I think - I think our lives were always complicated. Before the war it was complicated, with him being sick, and always tagged as a queer for being an artist, and me a Jew, and always - always! - with the lefty shit getting him beat up. And she - Carter - that was his dream life of simplicity. But he’s never satisfied with simple. There’s always some wrong to be righted. Some sword to fall on. But if he had just given us more time - if we had the time that other us had - maybe he would’ve figured it out. I mean it was the Depression, then his mom died! Then I got drafted. And all this shit. I figured it out regardless. I figured it out when I was fucking fourteen.

“But he’s - a coward. He ran from another stretch of the unknown. But he always has to get the last fucking word.”

After a long pause, Sam says, “I didn’t know you were Jewish.”

Bucky laughs, and it startles him, and he realizes he’s standing in the living room quivering, grimacing, fighting off tears. Then Sam’s up and off the couch and wrapping him in a hug, a real hug, and he smells like dryer sheets and fancy lavender soap and coffee from Darlene’s house and Bucky tilts his face into the crook of Sam’s neck and just breathes there for a moment.

He feels like he has been pacing in the bottom of a pit. And he has just begun to look up.

 

To his small group of unruly vets he says: “Something has changed.”

Gabi asks, “A good change?”

“Unknown.”

She seems satisfied with that answer. After the meeting he says he would like to get a coffee or a beer sometime. Bucky is continuously shocked by the willingness of people to forgive him.


	2. notes from underground

Days slide into weeks slide into months. Bucky goes to the VA, works on bikes, goes on runs, has coffee with Gabi, gracefully turns down an invitation to her board game nights. He and Sam have dinner with Darlene. He emails Shuri pictures of stray cats in DC. In July he pulls the letter Wanda sent from the drawer, five months after receiving it, and writes back.

It’s only as Bucky’s life stabilizes that he realizes how Sam had shrunk his own to accommodate. Sam picks up more shifts at the VA, runs errands, makes plans with friends, and starts training more intensely, though he doesn’t discuss that part with Bucky.

In the weeks after the funeral Sam had been with Bucky nearly constantly. He’d awoken him from nightmares, cooked him meals, talked him off ledges, sat with him in silence for hours, taken him to meetings.

His self-hatred had uncoiled into betrayal then further loosened into … Into what? Before, where there was a heart, there was nothing. Now, the heart is simply a cavernous loss. He would now rather feel the pain than the terrible void. And now he can look outward and see Sam with new eyes. Sam with his carefully furrowed brow and the twist to his mouth he gets when he disagrees with something. The indelicate yet thoughtful way he chooses words, unafraid of his own honesty. How he hums when he cooks breakfast. The sourdough starter he keeps in the fridge, the waffles he makes with the excess when he tends to it. How he can tell the difference between a war nightmare and a Soldier nightmare and a Steve nightmare, how he so fearlessly bursts into Bucky’s bedroom mid-nightmare, the bedroom of a man that somnambulated into his room and strangled him, to wake him up and give him orders: War dream? Sleep on the floor. Soldier nightmare? Lights on, look at me. Steve nightmare? Scoot over.

On one of these nights Bucky wakes up sweating and wild-eyed from a dream about following an old, decrepit Steve through a terrible quantum wormhole, but it was a quiet dream, and he’s alone. His thrashing had not woken Sam. And hardly thinking he gets up and creeps into the hallway. As he pushes open the door a sliver of dim light cuts through the darkness and illuminates Sam’s silhouette lying on his stomach, arms folded under his pillow, and he awakens squinting before shifting aside on the bed and murmuring, “Yo, come on.”

So Bucky crawls into his bed and pushes up against him, still shaky, and says, “Thank you,” and Sam just tucks an arm around him and falls back asleep.

_Wanda, how the hell do you thank the people who take you in? What do you do when you realize you’re the burden?_

__

_James, you don’t. You can’t. You use your words. But whoever helps you is your family. So I suppose all we can do is try to help them too, when we can._

 

Bucky is down the stairs as soon as Sam comes home.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

Sam grimaces down at his leg. “Yeah, just got a little nick training today. I’m taking a few days off, plus got some sweet Wakandan meds, so I should be back at it next week. Just gotta stay off it.” He realizes then he’s wearing sweatpants. “Wait, how did you know that?”

“I…” Bucky pauses, considers lying, but doesn’t. “I can smell it.”

“Very creepy,” Sam says with a grin. “I probably need to change the dressing, then we can fix dinner.”

“Sit down,” Bucky says. “Stop putting weight on it. I’ll get the kit.”

“Don’t worry, man, I got it.”

“Sit down,” Bucky says again, his eyes narrowed. “Elevate your leg.” Sam sits down on the couch.

Bucky fetches the med kit and kneels on the floor next to the couch. “Let’s see it.”

Sam pulls his sweatpants up to his knee with a slight grimace. The gash on his calf is beginning to stain the gauze dark.

“The shield?” Bucky slowly peels the gauze from the wound. The gash is long and deep, stapled together with Wakandan bandages that will dissolve as the wound heals. He soaks a cotton ball in alcohol and swipes it fast and smooth across the wound, cleaning the dried blood.

Sam hisses as Bucky works, his muscles tensing and jumping, so Bucky steadies his leg with one hand on Sam’s calf, gently gripping the tense muscle there, encouraging it to relax, as he works with his steady metal hand.

“Yeah,” Sam confirms. They haven’t talked about this - the Sam-with-shield thing. “I’m trying to learn how to throw it and get it to come back.”

“You need to be careful,” Bucky says. “Vibranium is weird. If it had hit you straight on you’d have a shattered fibula - or worse. That thing can cleave off a limb, easy.” The image of the shield embedded into the side of a van comes to mind. And the bone-vibrating shock of catching it when flung at full speed at his face. “Who’s training you?”

“No one, right now,” Sam says. “They just let me in to use the facility. I mean, I’m getting some hand-to-hand training with some guys from the VA, and I’ve been trying to schedule some time to either get to Wakanda or do like, I don’t know, some sort of videoconference training session but that’s all still sort of in the works--”

Right. Who would be able to train Sam now? Steve and Natasha are gone. Barton is re-retired, Thor is offworld, Banner's nonviolent. Everyone else has some sort of crazy power now. The only accomplished hand-to-hand fighters are in Wakanda. And Sam is a soldier. A human, like Nat, whose only enhancement is force of will. “You’re just throwing the shield around alone?”

“There’s other people in the building, so if I cleave off the top of my head or something people will find me, but…”

Bucky gives him a dark look. He finishes cleaning the gash, then carefully applies petroleum jelly before the fresh bandage. He finds he doesn’t want to remove his hand so he doesn’t keeping his warm hand on Sam’s calf, his metal hand checking the tape of the gauze, tracing the edge, then running over the curve and knobs of Sam’s ankle. “Where else are you hurt?”

“I’m not hurt,” Sam says.

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

“Bucky,” Sam says, and he leans down slightly to cup the back of Bucky’s head with his hand, turning Bucky’s face towards his own so their eyes meet. “Look at me. I’m not hurt.”

The hand on the back of his head feels good, secure. Safe. For one wild moment Bucky visualizes himself lifting up from his knees, closing the distance between them with a kiss. The desire to do so rolls over his body like an ocean wave, momentarily breathtaking and overwhelming and frightening. He looks away and it passes.

“No?” Instead Bucky reaches up and presses a hand to Sam’s abdomen. Sam, predictably, jerks back, letting Bucky go, and grimaces. “Or are you just not hurt bad enough to call it ‘hurt’?”

“Hey! What does that even mean?”

“Steve would do the same thing,” Bucky says. “Even before the serum, all, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ because he’s not actively bleeding out. What kind of hand-to-hand are you learning?”

“Muay thai.”

“So is that a kicked in the ribs bruise or a shield-catching bruise?”

Sam looks put-out, like a kid caught in a lie. “Shield-catching,” he grumbles. “The kicking bruises are more towards my kidneys.”

“Let me see,” Bucky says.

Sam hems and haws but does, lifting the hem of his sweatshirt to reveal a long, narrow bruise across his abdomen where he’d caught the shield against his body. Bucky notes swelling and redness on his hands and wrists as well, from the hand-to-hand, and the edges of patchy, purpling bruises on his ribs. He expects if Sam were to remove the sweatshirt he’d see more along his biceps and shoulders from blocking strikes.

“Come on,” Bucky says. “You can’t just leave those.”

“They’re bruises, they go away on their own.”

Bucky walks upstairs and Sam, huffing, follows him. He ushers Sam into the bathroom and then fetches his own med kit, not the shared one, but the emergency one he keeps in his room. In the bathroom he turns on the shower and steam floods the room. “You’re not giving your body enough time to recover,” he says. “If you’re in pain all the time, you’re tensed, can’t relax, can’t heal.”

“You’re one to talk,” Sam mutters, but he does as Bucky instructs: removes his shirt, sits on the edge of the bathtub with his feet under the spray. The bruises on his ribs and kidneys are pronounced, and Bucky was right about his arms as well. The tenseness, the knots are visible in Sam’s shoulders, how they creep up towards his ears, and how the muscle juts out along his spine. From his med kit Bucky pulls an jar of camphor liniment. It was a luxury in the 1930s, and he purchased (or stole) it to soothe Steve’s asthma and other various maladies, and then ran double-duty to ease Bucky’s muscles after a hard work day. He still likes it, likes the crisp, sharp smell of it, the strange cool-hot burn of it on skin as it melts tension. 

He doesn’t respond to Sam’s little barb, instead he swipes the liniment on Sam’s shoulders and presses his hands into the curve of his trapezius muscles.

“Oh,” Sam says, and his head tilts forward, nearly into the shower spray.

“Tense,” Bucky repeats, and pushes his thumbs into the muscle, and Sam groans. 

The steam mixes with the camphor, the smell rich and sharp and lung-opening, and Bucky loses himself in the simple ministrations of tending to someone else’s body, his hands working the knots out his trapezius and deltoids, gently encouraging bloodflow there, smoothing the liniment carefully along the bruises on his lats, adding pressure but not too much. Once all the most egregrious knots are smoothed out, Bucky starts with his thumbs at the base of Sam's skull, then runs them down his neck. Sam's breathing is slow and deep. Then Bucky's hands work across his shoulders again, then methodically down his back, along his ribs, to the divot on his lower back. He even leans in close, his nose almost touching Sam's neck, the camphor mixing with the smell of Sam's shaving cream. His right arm sweeps around Sam’s body, the heel of his hand smoothing a layer of the liniment across the narrow bruise on his abs.

Bucky lets his hand linger there for a moment, keeps his face close to Sam's neck. Then he brings his hands back to Sam's shoulders. For a moment he feels dizzy, warm, like he is drunk on touching him.

By the time he pulls himself away, cuts off the shower, and washes his hands, the silhouette of Sam’s back is noticeably different, softer, the muscles not straining angrily against skin anymore. Sam’s head is tilted forward, and Bucky gives Sam one last gentle squeeze on the back of the neck to bring him back into reality. “Better, right?”

Sam groans. “Dude.”

“Drink some water, lie down for a bit.”

“I think I just fell in love with you. Where did you learn that?”

His stomach flips. “Pre-war.”

“I don’t think I can stand up.”

“You’re being dramatic. Why are you pushing yourself so hard in training? It’s counterproductive.”

Sam scoots around to face him. “‘It’s counterproductive’-- man, he gave me the shield. I saw that man wield Thor’s hammer. I’ll tell you something, if I tried to pick up that hammer that bitch wouldn’t move an inch. The least I can do is get in shape.”

Despite Sam’s cheeky posturing his face falls. Suddenly seeing Sam collapsed into himself slightly on the edge of tub it’s as if the scales fall from Bucky’s eyes. His own chasm of loss is reflected back at him. Steve became godlike, genuinely, then ambled back in and passed the shield along and basically said here, now you do it. And Sam has the new weight of the title on his back alongside the loss of the two people he loved best.

“He’s the whole reason I’m doing any of this,” Sam mutters, almost to himself. “I never wanted to be a hero. I’m a soldier. I was just on his six.”

Two years spent in Europe, Sam and Steve, looking for Bucky. Not saving the world from corrupt Nazi organizations or genocidal aliens. Just looking for him.

“That’s probably why he gave it to you,” Bucky says. “He was just a soldier too, at the end of the day. Like us.”

Sam says nothing.

“Jeez, I’ve been a long way away, haven’t I?”

Sam looks up then, one elbow on his knee, his chin in the palm of his hand. “Yeah,” he says. “You’ve been going through it. Same as all of us.”

“Well, it sucks.”

That makes Sam laugh, and he hauls himself up to stand with an exaggerated groan. “Woah, dizzy. Well, I was going to cook dinner, but this whole sequence of events made me tired, so I’m ordering Chinese and I’m going to eat it in front of the TV. In?”

Over tofu szechuan, Bucky says, “I can show you how to throw it properly.”

 

“They really just let you come in here whenever?”

“Well, yeah,” Sam says. “I mean, I keep the shield at the house. Where else would I train, the YMCA?”

“Why not? The basketball court’s a pretty big space.”

Bucky and Sam are standing side-by-side at the far end of a long underground training bunker outside of DC. It’s a simple setup, with a control panel that allows for certain target arrays, and bright, recessed fluorescent lights. Fury had set them up with access, Sam had explained, so they wouldn’t be bothered. 

Sam looks competent and calm in tapered sweatpants and a too-small t-shirt (“Shut up! It’s for freedom of movement!”), the shield strapped to his forearm. He looks strong, sturdy and balanced - it’s easy to forget that Sam doesn’t have the serum, or superhuman abilities, or brainwashing beyond the regular military kind.

“You sure you want to do this?” Sam asks, gently, for the fifth or sixth time. 

To Bucky’s surprise seeing Sam with the shield doesn’t bother him. He was prepared to suffer some sort of mental break, like seeing Sam wield it might prove that Steve is gone. Guess he doesn’t need it proven.

“All right, then,” Bucky says, stepping back, tucking his hands into his hoodie pocket. “Show me what you’re working with.”

Sam hurls the shield with surprising grace, following through with a long sweep of his arm. The shield cuts through the air and clangs against the back wall, then fires back to Sam, who catches it two-handed with a grimace.

“That ain’t nothing,” Bucky says.

“Well, it’s all I got,” Sam says, “And that’s because I played a lot of ultimate frisbee in boot.”

“What are you trying to learn?”

Sam shrugs. “Why don’t you show off for me a little? I know you want to.”

The vibranium is cool in Bucky’s hands and though he knows it’s impossible it seems to thrum with phantom energy. The shield always feels like it wants to leap and fly of its own volition, quivering like a leashed animal. Times he’s held it snake into his memory - on the train before he fell, awkwardly, desperately. On the rooftop, catching in the Soldier’s hands and heaving it gracelessly back. Moving as one with Steve, tossing it back and forth, striking at Stark’s body in the suit. And now, again, he is but an interloper with the shield and it prepares for a new life with a new hero.

“Honestly? I don’t think I do,” Bucky says. “But here, we’ll start with this.” He places the shield face-down on the pavement and flips it back up into his hands. It doesn’t take long for Sam to learn.

 

Summer rolls into fall.

In the backyard Bucky builds bike after bike after bike: tricky little flatland BMX bikes, fixed gear beaters, sleek 21-speed racing bikes, hybrid commuters. The parts come from salvage shops and Craigslist, and the bikes go wherever they are needed. (Darlene has three.) He doesn’t ride them, that’s for young people, he insists, but disassembling and reassembling them is just complicated enough to be meditative. Similar to cleaning a weapon. Bucky is lean and tanned now from being outside, and he’s kept his hair long enough to pull back but has lost the beard, and he wears soft t-shirts and jeans and sneakers and he doesn’t wear gloves when he goes out. He goes to the VA. He goes shopping. He goes on runs.

The dreams fade in frequency and severity. Both he and Sam often sleep through the night, separately. Sam keeps training - he gets bigger, broader, and faster. The hero role comes to him easily, and Bucky tells him as much - he just had to grow into it. Sam throws a couch pillow at him. The weight of Steve’s loss is a low thrum beneath the rhythm of their shared life. Like a deep ocean it has subsumed the fighting part of Bucky. He is beginning to figure out what is left.

Bucky starts training hand-to-hand with Sam as Sam begins to outpace his combat sports instructors. Rather than the old SHIELD facility, they train in a real gym, a ratty old-school boxing gym south of DC, a vast warehouse space with cool concrete floors and unfinished ceilings, rows of heavy bags and two rings, grappling mats and free weights. It’s populated by serious men and women who are uninterested in the big handsome guy and the small guy with a metal arm.

Bucky idly does sit ups as Sam finishes wrapping his hands. “So what are we working on today? Taking me to the ground?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Close-quarters subduing.”

Bucky nods and checks the wrap on his right wrist.

“Hey.”

Bucky looks up.

“We don’t have to do this at all, you know,” Sam says.

“You always say that,” Bucky says. “I'm just a little tired.”

Sam does not look convinced. But he says, “Same rules as always, then,” and they square up on the grappling mats.

The body remembers. Though the Winter Soldier will never be an offensive weapon again, the muscles, bones, nervous system of his body snap together in elegant reflex as a defensive front. When Sam crosses the mats, angling slightly, throwing punches quick and exploratory to test the space between them, Bucky blocks unthinkingly, feet switching to control the empty space between them, and his own strikes fill the space between Sam’s before Bucky even realizes he’s thrown them.

The body defends. The mind goes to static.

Typically this will go on until Sam is exhausted and has gotten a few good hits in, perhaps learned a new blocking strategy, and then Bucky will awaken from the combat-trance sweaty and pumped but untired.

But this time, Sam moves quick and light on his feet, throws a left-leading combination of strikes that draws Bucky’s up to his head to block them, then follows that with a shift of his foot stance that draws his body right up into Bucky’s - much more aggressive than his usual style - and then a left knee sharply into Bucky’s diaphragm which makes him buckle forward, and then Sam sweeps his legs out from under him and gets him onto the mat.

It happens so fast.

Sam is beneath him, holding Bucky’s back to his front, his leg locked over Bucky’s, his arm around Bucky’s neck in a chokehold.

The Soldier remembers being restrained this way on the helicarrier.

His arm whirs and whines as he struggles against Sam’s grasp. But the hold just tightens.

The body knows what to do. Slam the head into the face behind it. Elbow into ribs. Foot on calf, break it. Flip hold. Left hand on neck. Squeeze until dark eyes pop out of skull.

Instead, Bucky chokes, “Red.”

Sam lets go immediately.

Bucky lies flat on his back, heaving for breath. Images of kills run across his memory and he lets them, not lingering on any, just watching them go by like cars on a highway, until his mind has run out of kills to show him, and settles down.

Sam is kneeling next to him. “Talk to me.”

“I’m all right,” Bucky says, and sits up with a grimace.

“You’ve never had to call it off before,” Sam says. “Is everything okay?”

“You’ve never won,” Bucky says.

Sam’s face brightens, then falls again. “What do you mean? You’ve been holding back on me?”

“No,” Bucky says. He struggles for a moment, finding language again. “But fighting is sort of - mindless. From all the programming. So I was afraid I would regress. And really hurt you. To get out of that hold.”

“How close were you to doing that?”

“Not very,” Bucky says, and honestly, he wasn’t. The mind figured out how to do it, but his body didn’t want to do the motions. He knew how. But he also knew it was Sam holding him. Sam’s callused hands and strong knotted forearms and rapid pounding heart and serious funny thoughtful no-bullshit face. “I don’t want to hurt you. But I could. So.”

“So you stopped it.”

“Well, you stopped.” He said the stopping word and Sam stopped.

“Of course I did,” Sam says.

What is the feeling that blooms in him now? Gratitude. Like poppies in a barren field.

Oh, Steve. If Steve could see him now. If he could feel this gratitude spreading through the body. The rich duality of feeling: holding this life like a gift, holding the lost unlived life like a dream. It can be both. He can be Bucky and the Soldier. He can live here, presently, without abandoning the past. He can hold two loves in his heart.

Perhaps that was the problem all along. Some unnamed bond kept him and Steve returning to each other, a century of love and war and death. It was consuming. A tear the world apart kind of love. How could it not be, after what they had been through, together and separately? It was a love that could’ve entwined them so tightly as to sink away from the rest of the world. No one in the world could understand one like the other - that’s the simple, isolating, truth. It was a love like a wildfire. He understands now the appeal of a love more like a fire in a hearth. Something warm and welcoming, simple, describable, like ‘home’. Steve loved him and Peggy both. 

With an exhale his spine sinks heavily into the mat.

Above him, Sam places a hand tentatively on his left shoulder where metal meets flesh. “Bucky? Everything okay?”

Bucky reaches up with a devilish smirk and wrenches Sam down and flips them, pulling him into the chokehold in which he just held Bucky.

“Hey!” Sam squawks. “Not fair!”

But he doesn’t give the stopping word, so Bucky holds him tight. “I’ll show you how to get out of it,” he says, and verbally walks Sam through the sequence, and Sam tests the motions.

It feels good. Playful. He hides a smile in the back of Sam’s neck.

At the house, Sam hollers “Mail call!” and whips a letter at Bucky.

He skims it. “Wanda’s going back to Sokovia.”

“Huh,” Sam says. “That seems like it could be good for her. Better than doing all of Clint’s farm work for him, at least. Probably like, ‘Wanda, till the fields!’ and she’s like ‘fwoom,’” he mimes her hand motions, “And then they’re all perfectly tilled and he gets all pissed about it because she’s not learning the value of hard work.”

As he narrates this Sam walks towards the bathroom, stripping off his shirt. Bucky finds his eyes skating across the planes of his broad shoulders, narrow waist, his dark skin unbruised and unblemished, the muscles shifting as he walks, his sweatpants low enough on his hips to show the elastic band of his compression shorts.

Sometimes Bucky feels inconceivably old. A soldier’s body is a miracle. His is, in a way, a terrible frightening cyborgian way. What staggering odds that a thrice-resurrected man and a man brimming with irrepressible life would find each other like this. These feelings, he thought his body had forgotten them. That they had died with his heart.

If there’s one truth about Bucky’s overlong, pain-ridden, sometimes heartbreakingly lucky life it’s this: Nothing about him ever really dies.

_James, I’ll write you from my new address once I'm settled. I worry about my effect on Clint. I know sometimes he sees me and for a moment he sees Natasha. Sokovia was only three years into recovering from the battle before the Vanishing. I feel called there to be of service. To find out who I am if I am not a weapon._

 

On a cool fall Saturday afternoon, neither Sam nor Bucky have anything to do, so they end up in the backyard. Bucky is in the middle of converting a clunky vintage 11-speed into a three-speed commuter. Sam lounges in a camping chair, thumbing through a novel written during the Vanished years, a beer resting at his feet.

“This book is depressing,” he says with a heaving sigh, laying it flat on his stomach and titling his face up towards the mid-afternoon sunlight. “I’m going to borrow one of your Le Carre novels. All the books I’ve picked up have been too depressing.”

“Everyone was depressed during those years,” Bucky says, helpfully.

“You entertain me. Recite me some poetry.”

“I’m not a performing monkey.”

“I could sing to myself, would that be better?”

“Doubtful,” Bucky says. “Don’t wanna scare away the birds.”

Sam blows a raspberry.

“Fine,” Bucky says. “How about this? _What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?_ ”

“Changed my mind,” Sam says immediately. “No poetry.”

Bucky snorts a laugh and returns to wrenching the pedals off the old bike so he can get to the bottom bracket.

“Now, how about this?” Sam says a few minutes later, still sunning himself like a lizard. “ _I can’t pay no doctor bills, but whitey’s on the moon. Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still, while whitey’s on the moon.”_

“Date?”

“1970. Gil Scott-Heron. Mom was in the Panthers, so I grew up listening to a lot of Gil. Don’t tell the government, they won’t let me be a superhero anymore.”

“Nothing’s changed I suppose,” Bucky says. “Everyone who can get there is ‘’off-world’ now.”

“Except us,” Sam says.

“Except us.”

“What do you remember about the 1970s?”

“It was the Cold War,” Bucky says flatly. “I was in and out of the ice a lot. But not usually in America. Third world. Destabilizing uprisings.” The pedal snaps off in his hand. “Блядь!”

“Sorry,” Sam says, sitting up. “That was a stupid question.”

“It’s not,” Bucky says. “I don’t mind talking about it. But there’s not much to say.”

They sit in companionable silence for a while. Bucky roots around in the small shed for a while and finds another set of crank arms that will fit the bike and sets to attaching them.

“You went with Steve looking for me,” Bucky says, eventually. 

“Yeah,” Sam says.

“What was it like?”

Sam sits up in his chair, suddenly rigid, full of nervous energy. He waits, like he’s afraid Bucky will retract the question, and then the stories start pouring out of him. Stories so close to the surface and so detailed Bucky can only assume Sam’s been telling them to himself over and over, or worked through them in his group sessions. Unwilling to share with Bucky without being prompted.

The stories he tells though are not the stories Bucky expected. It is not a tale of Sam and Steve on a fun road trip across Europe following Bucky’s paper trail (in the rare instances he left one), bumping into Natasha, and merrily collecting clues to find his hidey holes and the junk shops he worked at as he struggled to piece together the wreckage of his mind. No, Sam tells him about following Steve across Eastern Europe methodically locating and destroying HYDRA bases. About Steve finding old, out-of-use programming chairs and ripping them apart with his hands. About Steve dangling HYDRA operatives off buildings for information and then dropping them anyway. About sleepless nights, clothes caked in blood, and dead end after dead end.

“Not a rescue op,” Sam says. “A rampage.”

A wildfire. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says. “At the time I didn’t think… I didn’t think he would do that. Drop everything. I would’ve… I don’t know.”

“Well, at the time you were brainwashed,” Sam says. “And you’re not responsible for his choices.” Sam pauses, takes a breath. “I think he had a lot of guilt. About not looking for you, after you fell. Like he could’ve prevented all this if he had been more diligent. So he took things too far, trying to make up for that.”

“That fuckin’ guy,” Bucky mutters. “Everything’s gotta be his fault.”

That surprises a laugh out of Sam. “Jesus. That’s just - it’s really true.”

“Known him a while.” He focuses on the bike. “Or. Knew him. I’m sorry you got caught up in this mess between us.”

Sam shrugs. “I’m not.”

He’s helping Darlene hang Halloween decorations at her school when his secure phone buzzes. Assuming it’s Shuri or Gabi he fishes it out of his pocket.

_Headed to NY with tic-tac per boss’s orders. Someone’s having too much fun with Chitauri/Asgardian tech hybrids… back asap._

He included a bird emoji.

For a moment Bucky stares at his phone.

It’s a mission. He’d been lulled into the routine of training and working and reading and volunteering that he’d forgotten all the shield-throwing and fighting was leading up to this. And he finds himself cold with fear.

Darlene pauses where she’s taping another paper skeleton in the window and looks at him concerned. “All good?”

He shakes himself out of it. “Yes, fine.”

He texts back: “ _Did you tell Darlene?”_

Immediate response: _“NO, and don’t.”_

 

For the next two days he hears nothing. Sam and Scott must be tracking, information gathering, planning. Then, on the third day, he sees the breaking news online, and hurries to the bar down the block. It’s not a true dive bar - not like the places he haunted in Brooklyn and Paris all those years ago - it’s a pizza joint with a bar. He likes it, despite the fact that alcohol does nothing to his serum-mutated metabolism. Bars are the few places left in the world that one can be welcomed to do nothing. Or occasionally to brood.

The bartender, a distracted young woman, sells him a pale beer as he slides into a seat in front of the TV. She sees his focus on it and turns the sound on.

“Minor destruction in New York City this afternoon as two Avengers-adjacent vigilantes thwarted an attempted bombing of the Bronx Zoo. The vigilantes, known as the Falcon and Ant-Man, seized a stockpile of experimental alien technology. Four civilians were injured. The suspected arms dealer is in police custody.”

Onscreen, shaky cell phone footage shows Falcon in a new, elegant wingsuit with red and navy detailing. A man with an immense glowing weapon points it at Falcon but suddenly loses his balance as Ant-Man appears behind him. The camera zooms in on Falcon, capturing the image of the shield strapped to his back. From the air, Falcon grabs the shield off his back and whips it at the man with the gun, using his wingsuit for leverage to gain speed and power. The shield files true and slices the weapon cleanly in half, slams against the pavement and rockets back. Falcon catches it easily, slots it back into place on his back, and drops out of the sky to bring the fight to the ground.

God, he looks confident.

“Bystander footage shows the vigilante known as Falcon wielding a shield similar to the shield wielded by his known associate Captain Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America. As there has been no word from Captain Rogers since the reversal of the Vanishing, the footage has sparked rumors about Captain Rogers’ retirement and the potential for a new Captain America.”

In a fit of impulsiveness he picks up his cell phone.

“You’re watching the news, aren’t you?” Gabi says, on the first ring.

“Hello. Yes.”

“So Cap’s gone? Falcon’s the new Cap?”

“I’m at Angelino’s in Kingman Park. Do you want a beer?”

As the restaurant fills with families and couples and the bar fills with service industry professionals ending and starting shifts, Gabi in her sleek dark clothes and Bucky in a ratty t-shirt of Sam’s sit and watch the news (on mute again) though there’s nothing new to see. Just the same footage of Falcon throwing the shield, Ant-Man changing size.

“You think you’ll ever do any of that?” Gabi asks, nodding at the TV.

“No,” Bucky says. “Well. Probably. But I hope not. What about you?”

“Me? Remember how I said I was an EMT? Not like, a flying MMA fighter?”

“Those skills can be taught,” Bucky says. He lets his voice go Brooklyn. “You got moxie, kid.”

“Boy, you are old,” she says.

“I helped train him for this,” Bucky says, swirling his glass, watching the liquid inside whirlpool. “I don’t want to do it myself. But I also don’t like.. This.”

“Being on the bench.”

“Right.”

“You know I know who that is too, right?”

Bucky says nothing.

“Just saying. If you feel like you can’t say something to protect him. It’s all good.”

“This is what I mean,” Bucky says. “I can get you in touch with the right people to make you a flying MMA fighter.”

They talk, they share beers, they shoot the shit. The news winds down. As they leave Angelino’s Gabi pulls him into a one-armed half-hug and says, “This was fun. Let’s do it again.”

In the emptiness of Sam’s house his mind shows him potential disasters, compulsively running through ways the mission could go sideways. Sam taking alien gunshots, the wingsuit failing, the enemy jerking him from the sky as Bucky once did, a shield return gone wrong; gunfire, blood, maiming, death.

Strange to see these images not of memory. But he treats them the same. Lets them pass through his mind, not lingering on them, just letting the creativity of his disfigured imagination exhaust itself. And eventually it does.

Worrying is exhausting. Bucky lies down on the couch and listens to infomercials on television. There is a resignation in being left behind. Sam will come back. Or otherwise, he won’t. Either way time passes. Bucky continues to live, not in the war, but carnage-adjacent.

The thought of losing Sam is so distantly frightening he can’t focus his mind on it, like trying to look into the sun. What would he do now, without Sam? Build bikes and chat in meetings and remember how he, the strong one, the superhuman one, was too addled to fight? 

Shame engulfs him. This is a bullshit life. The ghost of the Soldier feels layered inside him like his self is a costume. But. What if the feeling, the sensation, is not the truth? What if this terrible beast leashed inside him is just patterns in his nervous system? Seventy years of combat, destruction, stealth - a skillset unmatched yet squirreled away. He has nothing to offer the world besides this skillset used so long to sew chaos and despair. The intent was to protect the world from the Soldier’s wrath. Wisdom, he thought, but in reality, cowardice.

It’s late, but he texts Sam anyway. _“I saw you on the news.”_

Time passes gut-churningly slowly. Then, a response. _“How’d I look???”_

He’s alive. There’s that. _“You need to work on your in-air catching.”_

_“You need to work on your compliments!!!”_

 

Sam arrives late the next evening, emerging from an unmarked car dragging a duffel and a pack, slumped with exhaustion.

At the door Bucky takes his bags and sets them aside and herds Sam to his bedroom, where Sam collapses onto the bed with a heaving sigh.

Bucky stands in the doorway until Sam rolls his eyes and pats the bed next to him. Bucky slides onto the bed gingerly, careful not to jostle Sam’s body at all lest he be hurt.

“How are you?” Bucky asks.

“Tired. Sore. Mentally tired more than anything else. Making all the decisions sucks, man. It’ll take some getting used to.”

“Injured?”

“Bruises, lacerations,” Sam says. “Super minor burn from the guns. It looks a lot worse than it is so don’t freak out.” He lifts his shirt, revealing a spackled red burn, surface-level but discoloring his torso from hips to ribs like a nebula. 

“Jeez,” Bucky says. “It does look bad.” Without thinking he places the cool metal of his left arm on the burn. Sam watches him with a soft careful look.

Time seems to slow down. The simplicity of this moment stretches.

“Hey,” Sam says. Bucky can’t seem to look away from the burn. “Hey,” Sam says again. “Come here.” Sam shifts closer and pulls Bucky into an embrace, tugging him close so he’s mostly on top of Sam’s chest, the top of his head bumping against Sam’s narrow jaw. Sam’s hands wrap comfortably around his back, fearlessly, and he says, “It’s all good, man. I missed you.”

If anything happened to Sam, Bucky would kill like a plague. He would move through the world unseen and unheard, a shade, a ghoul. He would abandon whatever selfhood he has now to cut throats and break spines. He knows this truth like his own name.

Love as vengeance: the only kind he knows. Wildfire love. He can’t even blame the Nazis for this one.

“You’re thinking very loud,” Sam mutters.

From where he’s laying Bucky can hear the thundering sound of Sam’s heart. “I’ll let you rest.” He pulls away and sits up.

Sam folds his arms behind his head, watching Bucky curiously. “Sleep in here. I’m processing.”

Finally Bucky says, “Okay.” He can take this offering, this strange experience of sharing a bed without a blood-curdling nightmare as an excuse. And the memory will sustain him for however long he needs it.

Lying side-by-side, face-to-face, Sam’s hand finds Bucky’s cheek and he searches his face unselfconsciously. It’s hard to look Sam in the eyes but Bucky finds himself doing it briefly, looking into his big dark doe eyes, then noting the bruising on his jaw, the lines in his forehead, his slightly chapped lips, then the arch of his neck, his trapezius muscles knotted again. The shape of his body horizontal on the bed like a landscape, like seeing home from a distance. Oh it makes Bucky hurt so bad. He’s so fucking homesick.

They rest like that, together, quietly, for a long time. He doesn’t know what Sam does or does not find in his own scruffy face. In silence Sam falls asleep. Bucky creeps to his own room and in the darkness he pulls the box of his old things from the closet. He bypasses Steve’s white henley still unwashed for fear of what the scent memory will trigger and instead opens his old journal for the first time since he lost it.

The words are a map to where he was, what he was doing, in that foggy space between the DC and Bucharest. He reads long, rambling pages where he tried to parse between programming and memory, entries that start in Russian then switch to English then Spanish then old dialects of Farsi. He’d written grocery lists and carefully logged things he ate that made him sick. He’d written down the addresses of his safehouses and squats, lest he forget them, soup kitchens, daily odd jobs. One page is just his own name, written over and over. Another is a transcription of every display in the Smithsonian exhibit about Captain America. He can see the confusion and desperation in the shakiness of his letters. And pictures of Steve cut out from newspapers and taped inside. 

He remembers hearing someone in his barren apartment in Bucharest. Entering silently and seeing Steve’s broad back, his head bowed slightly as he held the notebook in his hands.

In the journal he can trace the cities he bounced between during those two years - always cities. Toulouse, Munich, Athens, Ankara. Searching then for the same thing he seeks now: a way of being in the world. And here in Sam’s house he thought perhaps he found that way, more so than in Romania or Wakanda. But the risk chills him. Losing Steve took him back to the brink of madness. He won’t go through that again. He won’t take Sam down with him.


	3. home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in

The only person he tells, using his voice, is Gabi. (“Running away?” “Running towards.” “If you say so.”) And that’s only so his group doesn’t assume the worst, or that’s what he tells himself.

He can't tell Darlene, because Darlene will tell Sam. Or that’s what he tells himself.

And Sam.

He wouldn’t be able to leave.

_Sam - I gotta get out of here. I don’t want you to think it’s anything you did. I just gotta get my head on straight. You don’t need me to train you anymore. I was kidding about needing to work on your aerial catches. You’ve surpassed me. You can do things with the suit and the shield that I didn’t even think were possible. And you showed me I could do things or be things I didn’t think were possible. At least not anymore. This old man needs a vacation somewhere new. Too many ghosts of me and others around here. I’ll drag you down. Go fly. I’ll write soon._

He leaves the note in Sam’s bedroom. He’s in a bathroom tucked away in a peripheral corner of his least favorite international airport, JFK, when his phone starts buzzing incessantly with calls. When he doesn’t answer five in a row, the texts start coming.

_AGAIN?_

_AGAIN???_

_Quit being such a drama queen and call me back._

_Where are you going? Why? Was it the mission???? TALK TO ME_

_Don’t make me tour Eastern Europe again. It sucked. The food sucks_

_I just want to understand man. I thought we were in this together._

_I’m so fuckin confused._

_I can’t do this without you._

Bucky turns off his phone. In the bathroom of JFK he plugs in the clippers he bought for an inordinate amount of money from a weird vending machine and crops his hair down to an even short length. He cleans the mess meticulously without looking in the mirror.

 

May in Algiers is a mild kind of cold weather that has Bucky wearing long-sleeved flannel shirts and a lightweight glove on his left hand. In the six months he’s been here his rusty, deep-memory Arabic has come back rapidly and messily. His French, known from both war and programming, is old school Parisian. Both languages feel sweet in his mouth. The city itself is old and rich and beautiful and the breeze from the bay is light. Bucky rents a rat-trap south of the wealth, in Djasr Kasentina.

He works dispatch for a courier company in Algiers proper - a fleet of young men and women who hand-deliver time-sensitive documents from embassy to embassy. His boss, an ancient war hammer of a man called Nasser, likes him for being an unflappable polyglot.

“ _Yallah,_ Jacques,” Nasser calls from the messy desk he calls his office, in the back of the squat basement room from which the entire operation runs. Rent near city center, where the embassies and hospitals and lawyers are, is outrageous, as Nasser reminds him constantly, they’re lucky his cousin lets them work out of the restaurant’s basement! “Lots of orders today, tight schedule, Malik sprained his ankle and his bike is fucked so you need to fix that too. Why are you late?”

“Morning, Nasser,” Bucky says as he ambles over to the other desk in the space, his desk, and thumbs through the dispatch requests. “Metro was late. But I’m here now, with you, _mashallah._ ”

Nasser narrows his eyes at him. “You should ride a bike like the rest of the couriers.’

“Too old,” Bucky says. “Bad knees.”

“All you young people these days complaining about being old, joints hurting. Appreciate it now, Jacques. Remember when I said it only gets worse.”

“I could never forget you, _cherie_ ,” Bucky purrs, and Nasser throws a bike pedal at him, and then they both settle in to smoke cigarettes and answer calls.

He knows who he is, here, in Algiers. He is Jacques Buchanan, ex-pat, veteran, project manager, fix-it guy in his building. The guy who can fix your air conditioning or your car or your fridge and won’t ask for pay. The guy who will walk your kids home from school if you’re stuck late on shift. The guy who works long days for little money for the pleasure of watching couriers come in breathing heavy, exerted, but endorphin-drunk, delivering documents of power and change and god knows what else. It’s a simple life. He has friends, community, an identity. He is part of the fabric of a neighborhood.

Today's pile of documents, ordered by time sensitivity and urgency, is unremarkable. His couriers will be arriving soon to begin the handoffs. With the few minutes he has before the day begins, he pulls from his desk a slim stack of letters.

Upon arriving in Algiers and settling into an apartment he did as promised and wrote Sam. It was a short note. He was unsure what to write having never responded to the calls or texts. To his shock Sam had responded with a long, freewheeling letter free from rage or accusation or betrayal. He skims through that one first, softened and faded from being turned over in his hands so many times, reading Sam's lamentations about his "bug-themed coworkers" and "your scary friend Gabi." 

_I wish you had talked to me about wanting to leave. I don't want you to think I'm angry, because I'm not, but I thought you and I were in this whole processing/healing thing together. I didn't realize you were hiding this, hurting so bad. I know you're hurting but I didn't know I was making it worse. That kills me to think about. I hope you find what you need. And whenever you want to come back, if you want to come back, you know I got you. I got you no matter what._

Before Bucky could respond, another letter arrived, and another. For every note Bucky sends Sam sends two or three. They're long and rambling accounts of his day-to-day life, training, Darlene's classes, the VA, Gabi asking increasingly pointed questions about the details of Avengering. They always end in the same way. _If you want to come back, I got you._

He unfolds the scratched-out, heavily revised draft of a letter to Sam. He'll rewrite it nice before he sends it. Maybe even write it on stationary.

_I'm beginning to wonder if it's possible for me to have a community like this with people who know my past. It's lighthearted here. There are problems certainly but not problems of violence and death. I wonder if the thing that brings people down is me._

Too melodramatic.

_I want people to feel comfortable when they know me as me, the way they do when I am this person, 'Jacques.'_

The first courier arrives with a shouted _Ahlan!_ and Bucky snaps back into the present. He tucks the draft in with the rest of the letters. And so the daily madness begins.

Ten hours later Bucky takes the rattling metro back to his quiet neighborhood and his looming beige building. Throughout the week he works at his letter until he has something he can send, and then he does.

Just days later a response arrives.

_'Jacques' is still you. Just without the weight of other peoples' preconceived notions. Fuck em! (Kidding... mostly.) People are gonna have preconcieved notions about people like us. Good people have open minds. Maybe it's like pre-sorting. So we only build relationships with the good ones. Easier to say that than to face the reality of what that process is actually like, though._

_I'm really missing you these days. I miss Steve and Nat. The new guys, Scott and Peter, are just so inexperienced. Everyone else is magical or in space or busy running an African nation. The house feels empty without you here. If you decide you want to come back, you know I got you._

A new nightmare enters his repetoire, sliding into his sleep like a noxious gas. in the dream he is trapped inside his body - Bucky's mind, the Soldier's actions. The soldier moves methodically through the Djasr Kasentina apartment building. From the roof he works his way down, kicking in apartment doors and finding sleeping residents in their beds, stifling their cries and strangling them to silence. On the top floor, he kills his friends and neighbors who share the building with him in his waking life. On the floor below, Nasser and the couriers. Then down the stairs and his hands kill Steve and Nat. On the ground floor of the building, it's Darlene, Gabi, Wanda, and Sam. Mission completed, he enters the last room of the building and sits in the chair, feels the restraints clank closed, and watches the headgear descend.

He wakes with cramps in his legs from tensing. He takes to sleeping with a slip of leather between his teeth to stop the clenching headaches. the murderous efficiency of the dream is both disturbing and laughable. This morning, it's the fourth instance of the dream. He towels the sweat off his body and makes coffee.

His group at the VA would say he's afraid of his capabilities. That he cannot be trusted. That his past makes him beyond trusting. That the only way to be worthy of trust is to be someone else completely. But the people in his dream trust, or trusted, him, regardless of his perceived worthiness.

Maybe he is not totally objective about what determines worth.

As the dim morning light filters into his small kitchen Bucky doesn't notice his Turkish coffee overflowing on the stove as he flexes the metal fingers of his left hand and lets them hum and whirr and catch the light.

 

Algiers only a four-hour flight and two-hour train ride to Sokovia. He can't go back to DC - not yet. He writes Wanda and she writes back with a list of projects with which she could use some help.

For two weeks Bucky trains ankle-sprained Malik on dispatch.

“Jacques, no one is as good as me at dispatch, but you are close,” Nasser says. “When you return Pegase will be bigger and faster and I will have ten dispatchers, and maybe a job for you if you need one, _inshallah._ ”

He ends his month-to-month lease. His neighbors in his building find out and surprise him with a potluck dinner in his tiny apartment, cramming it full of food and people. Safiya and her daughters who he walked home from school. Muhammad who finally bought a new air conditioning unit. The very elderly Wafa whose mail he picked up diligently three times a week.

None of these people know Wanda, or Sam, or Bucky Barnes. And he loves this community with a terrifying ferocity. His love is always so terrifying. He wonders if others feel that way but he can’t find a way to ask. Here, in Algiers, he began to become a person he wanted to be: kind, reliable, generous, decidedly not murderous. He will try again.

 

In Sokovia the train rattles past the immense crater that was once the capital city of Novi Grad. The closest functioning township, Kruševac, is just miles outside the rubble. Bucky steps off the train as the sun sets, on a small platform in a small town, its buildings squat and white with rust-red roofs, its roads cobbled. The air in Kruševac is crisp, high-altitude, and the trees deep dark green under the grey sky. The town feels old and tired. The people in it have seen and lost too much.

He finds the address Wanda gave him near the center of town, in a small square of bars and restaurants. It's a narrow, dark building with a few tables outside and small sign that reads "пекара" in the window. It's a bakery. As Bucky stands there examining the building a large, dark-haired man in a spotless apron with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth steps outside and begins stacking the tables and chairs.

The man says something in a Slavic language Bucky, to his surprise, doesn't understand.

"I don't understand," Bucky says, in Russian.

"I said we're closed," the man says, in Russian.

"I'm looking for Wanda Maximoff."

The man stops stacking chairs. He turns and faces Bucky with his arms crossed over his chest. "Who are you?"

He thinks about lying. "James Barnes."

The man's eyes flicker to his left arm. "You are the Winter Soldier."

There are many different ways he could get out of this conversation with either lies or violence. Should things go awry with honesty he can always resort to violence. This thought gives him the courage to say, "I was. I'm not anymore."

"Then who are you?"

Bucky almost laughs. He doesn't know how to answer. "A friend of Wanda's," he decides. "She's expecting me."

"Hmph," the man says. "So they're letting war criminals in the Avengers now. Makes sense with their track record."

"Branislav," comes a voice from overhead. "Don't scare him off, now." On the second level of the building, a side door opens and Wanda steps onto the landing of a narrow iron staircase. Her red hair is pulled into a loose bun atop her head, and so unlike her usual black or maroon clothes she's wearing a soft ochre sweatshirt. Bucky realizes gazing up at the awning slack-jawed like a fool that he hasn't seen her since Tony's funeral.

Branislav switches back to Serbian, and he and Wanda bicker good-naturedly back and forth. There's an openness to their communication, a tilt to Wanda's head and a furrow to Branislav's brow. Branislav is defensive of her, protective. Sweet and unnecessary. When Wanda is near the atmosphere around her seems to crackle with power.

Finally, with some encouraging from Wanda, Branislav steps forward and offers his hand to shake. "You are welcome here," he says in gruff Russian. And then he finishes putting his chairs away.

"He's my landlord," Wanda says, apologetically, as she takes Bucky's small rucksack from him and shows him to the tiny guest bedroom in her apartment. "He is a good man. Survived the Ultron attacks and then survived the Vanishing. So he is a bit rough around the edges." 

"I understand." Bucky follows her around the small apartment, with its lush window treatments and sparse but elegant furniture - not a rich space but a comfortable, welcoming space. It reminds him of Darlene's house. There's no television but the coffee table is covered with books and stacks of paperbacks creep up the walls, books in Serbian and Russian and English, poetry books, novels, nonfiction, graphic novels. They capture his attention and he begins mentally picking ones out that interest him, ranking and ordering where he will begin working through the stacks.

When he looks up, Wanda is leaning against the counter in the kitchen. "You're not checking for bugs," she says.

He's not.

He's not checking the perimeter for weaknesses. Nor checking crevices for cameras or microphones. Nor setting up his own alarms to alert for intruders.

He wants to see Sam so badly and so suddenly it's like a physical blow in his chest.

"I guess I'm not," he says.

Wanda fixes tea, and they engage in the awkwardly comfortable conversation of two people who have built a relationship in letters and not in the challenging ever-changing physical world. It gets easier when Wanda smooths out a map of Sokovia on the coffee table with her projects labeled and color-coded, and suddenly Bucky has a friend and a mission.

 

They're in a dense, regrowing wood outside of the Novi Grad crater. It's chilly but the sun beats down, so Bucky's abandoned his shirt and Wanda's down to a tank top as Bucky follows her down some unseen path, pushing a large wheelbarrow.

"Can I ask you something?" Bucky asks as they come to a stop.

Wanda crouches and places her hands on the dirt. The air crackles around her, her eyes glowing as she channels energy into the ground. "This way," she says, and Bucky shoulders his shovel again and follows her. "And sure," she says. "Anything."

At a spot Wanda designates Bucky begins shovelling. "You mentioned that Clint sometimes thought you were Natasha," he says. "Is everything... is everything okay?"

She sighs, then kneels again in the dirt and searches again. "Got another possible hit," she says. "Yes, everything is okay. I would be dead without Clint. I don't know what I would've done if he hadn't welcomed me into his home. But, you know, we all process grief differently. His grief is very complicated. He grieved his family for five years in a very gruesome way. Then he got them back, but he lost Natasha. I wonder sometimes if Natasha was the great love of his life. Maybe not the romantic love but the defining love, you know? He needed to process that with his family. His non-superpowered family." She laughs ruefully. "He did not ask me to leave. But I saw him start to try to heal and process rather than just endure. So I thought, perhaps that would be good for me too."

"Did you know her? Natasha?"

"Not well. Our paths only seemed to cross when the whole team was needed. But there was a sense of kinship between us. Understanding. Like you and me. Those were were created for dark purposes and chose to transform."

"That's a nice way of thinking about it," Bucky says. The shovel strikes metal a few feet down. He excavates around the edge of the debris carefully, unearthing half an Ultron sentry torso with the arm still partially attached. He tosses it to Wanda.

"Good find." She tosses it into the wheelbarrow. She could easily locate all the sentry wreckage in the Sokovian landscape and then wrench them from the ground with one intense activation of her powers. But, she'd explained to Bucky as they pored over the map, she didn't want to risk damaging the landscape any more than it already was, or, God forbid, rip out recently rebuilt water mains or power lines. So she'd been doing it the careful, tedious way, digging up the parts mostly by hand.

The self-abnegation part of it was implied. Wanda is calculating her mistakes hole by hole, recording them in the calluses of her hands. And each sentry recovered is one less on the black market.

"I think I knew Natasha when I was the Soldier." Bucky fills the hole back with dirt. "I never asked about it."

"Our lives offer no time for delay," she says, and waves him forward. Bucky heaves the wheelbarrow up and follows her to the next site.

When Wanda walks through the forest like this, focused on finding the next piece of debris, red sparks dance along her skin in such a natural way Bucky wonders if the rest of the time she controls it. Keeps it down. "Two Hydra weapons of mass destruction," he says cheerfully. "And look at us now."

That makes Wanda laugh, a bright, musical sound Bucky can't remember ever hearing before.

 

Methodically they clear square mile after square mile of Sokovia. July is hot. July is when he wakes up to the sound of Wanda weeping in the living room, and when she tells him about her nightmare - her one singular nightmare, the one that surpassed the Hydra nightmares and nightmares of Pietro's death - her one memory of killing Vision playing over and over in her mind. August is hotter. August is when Bucky tells Wanda about Steve, and about Sam, and about the terror of new love. 

The digging is meditative. Both Bucky and Wanda grow broader and stronger working side-by-side in the blazing heat. Bucky keeps cutting his hair, short on the sides and a little longer on top, similar to how he wore it before the war. In the repetition of the work more war songs emerge from Bucky's memory, and he sings unselfconsciously for himself and for Wanda, letting his voice echo through the trees, disturbing the wildlife. For the first time in a long time, unafraid of being heard. He sings _The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling_ , and _Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye_ , and _Pack Up Your Troubles_. He even puts on his Cockney accent and sings Formby for Wanda, and eventually she learns the words to _Our Sergeant Major_ and will even sing it to him, after the workday, when she's had a drink or two.

His nightmares wane. He and Sam fall into an rhythm of letter exchange a few times a month. Sam's letters are still long and rambling and he's started including photos, very small instant-develop photos tucked into the envelopes. Photos of Darlene and Sam, of Sam with the Parker kid in a headlock, Gabi looking annoyed, Banner looking confused.

He includes updates of life in DC, Darlene's upcoming triathalon, his training, working with Peter and Scott and occasionally T'Challa and Stephen Strange. He writes incredulously of Gabi's until-recently undisclosed background in krav maga, and while they're not called the Widow's Bites, Banner is developing some similar technology for her. 

_There's a new new temporary facility in Jersey now, while they (Potts and Hogan spearheading, I think) keep trying to un-fuck the battle site upstate. I love DC but I'm thinking about relocating to be closer. Not to Jersey EVER but I grew up in Harlem, could be nice to go back._

"Allo," Wanda says as she comes home from running errands in town, laden with grocery bags. "I got strawberries. And Branislav gave us some khrustyky, he is testing new recipes." She drops the bags in the kitchen then sits on the couch next to Bucky, peering at the little photos he's got spread on the coffee table. "These are very cute," she says. "He sends these with each letter?"

"Usually," Bucky says, picking up one of Sam holding the shield, sticking his tongue out at the camera. "I don't know where he got a camera like this. I like them though."

"Have you told him you like them? Or that you miss him?"

"I... I don't know. It's implied."

"You should tell him," Wanda says. "It's nice to see those sentiments in words. I like that you write letters. It's very old school."

"I'm old," Bucky says.

"Who is this cute scary woman?"

"What would I even say?"

"Oh, I like this one with the Spider-child."

"Everyone is bug-themed these days," Bucky says. "Why is that?"

Wanda laughs again. He loves her laugh. She pats him on the shoulder and goes into the kitchen to put away the groceries. He writes his first draft of his letter back - he'll scratch it out, revise it, rewrite it, make it something easier to read, something simple and palatable. Add the draft to the pile of drafts. But first he just has to write it.

_Sam, I miss you bad. I like the photos though I can't figure out where the hell you found a camera like that. Things are good here and Wanda and I are doing good work and I think I needed this, this time away from everything to just do something simple and good and try to figure out who I can be. So it's good and I like it here and Wanda is amazing and I miss you like crazy. That day at the lake I don't know why you took me home with you like some sort of abandoned dog but I owe you my life for it. I hope you will keep writing me. I'm going to come back but I'm not done in Sokovia yet. But when I think about the rest of my life I know I need you close by. I like the idea of you moving to Harlem. Get out of Darlene's hair already._

He doesn't re-read it. He just sends it.

The response includes a photo of Sam and Darlene at the finish line of her triathalon. _If I moved to New York would you come too?_

_Yes. I would. I will._

Bucky has a good dream. In the dream he's on the grappling mats of the warehouse gym with Sam. They spar, and Sam pins him. And Sam holds him there for a long moment and in the dream Bucky has the fortitude to hold his gaze, and bare his throat and let Sam see him, see the extent of his wrongs and the depth of his loss and the blood and grief and misery and that terrible howling love inside him, and Sam sees, and then Sam kisses him.

 

By the middle of September, Wanda can't find any more Sentry debris.

"I wanted to be finished before winter," she says. "You sped the process up quite a bit."

"So what's phase two?"

"It's more of a personal project," she admits. "I could use the help, certainly, but it's not as dangerous as the Sentry parts. I just want to... pull things from the wreckage. Things that seem important. Photos, or records, or heirlooms. Potentially bodies, if any are still there. I just don't want to leave it unfinished."

"Where will these things go?"

"A museum, maybe," she says. "Or an archive. I have some contacts in the government. The Department of Damage Control did the bare minimum and left the rest up to contractors. Just a shitshow. I can't just let peoples' lives rot in the dirt like that."

"Okay," Bucky says. "When do we start?"

 

They fall into another rhythm in the cooler fall months. In the mornings Bucky helps Branislav load the bakery delivery truck, then meets Wanda at the Novi Grad crater and loads her finds on pallets. In the afternoons he fixes things in Kruševac proper - a water heater in Branislav's neighbor Sveta's house, broken windows at the local school, the bakery's back doorframe. Then he starts fixing bikes again, starting with Sveta's granddaughter Maja whose bike needs training wheels put on it, which snowballs into Maja introducing Bucky to a gaggle of girls who all want their bikes to be clean and shiny and fast like Maja's. So he ends up passing slow afternoons outside the bakery with bikes flipped upside down on their handlebars and seats, fixing derailleurs, replacing chains, truing wheels. 

Then it's November, and he's been gone a year. Wanda's slowed down her pace in the crater, still delivering heirlooms to families or government archives, but she seems to be finding less and less in the wreckage.

It's cold and dark outside, snow threatening, and he and Wanda are fixing dinner. Nothing fancy, but it's nice to be together in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, listening to music and static on weak Sokovian radio. The smallness of the apartment and the chill of the floor under his bare feet reminds him of Brooklyn, but not in a way that hurts.

"I think I'm going to go back to America soon," Bucky says.

"I've been thinking about that too," Wanda says.

"You have?"

"Banner's been calling me. Clint, too."

"I think I'll leave in about a month," Bucky says. "In December."

"Good timing. Branislav closes the bakery in January," Wanda says. "He goes to London to visit his daughter. He always says he won't come back."

"What about you?"

"December sounds pretty good," Wanda says.

 

Over the next few weeks Bucky fixes as many bikes, doorframes, space heaters, and cars as he can. Branislav packs up a few loaves of bread and gives him a firm handshake, and then wraps Wanda into a bear hug and says something in Serbian that makes her tear up.

"Thank you for your hospitality," Bucky says to Branislav in Russian.

"You are always welcome in London," Branislav says. "I think I will stay there this time."

Then they take the train to Prague and sit side-by-side on a flight to JFK. Then, it seems like one moment they were standing in the Kruševac train station, and suddenly they're disembarking in the bustling terminal at JFK surrounded by a mass of people and languages. Wanda has a connecting flight to Missouri to catch, and Bucky feels the world shrink away as he looks at her: her hair in a loose braid down her shoulder, that same ochre sweatshirt she wore their first day together hanging loose and soft on her broad shoulders. Her eyes are bright when she looks at Bucky and places one hand on his cheek and Bucky thinks for a moment he can feel the sparks of power there. "Thank you for helping me," she says.

Bucky almost laughs. "Right, because you were the one who needed help."

"I did," she says with a smile. "And you did too. You remind me so much of my brother. Did I ever tell you that?"

"No."

"It's your smile. It makes me happy to see it."

Bucky pulls her into a hug.

"Tell Clint hello," he says. "Tell him to come visit."

"I'll be in the city in a month or two, I expect," she says. "I can't let you boys have all the fun."

 

Wanda leaves to catch her flight. In the JFK bathroom Bucky rinses his face with cold water. His hair is still short, longer on top, and he's broad and tan and clean-shaven. He's wearing a plain white t-shirt and a brown leather jacket, lightweight gloves, soft beanie. He looks like a person. Just another normal traveller on the way to somewhere.

He takes the subway from JFK into Manhattan, then heads north to Washington Heights. On the uncrowded A-train with his small duffel between his feet, he smooths out his last letter from Sam, checking the return address again.

Mid-December in New York is brisk and grey. The city is looks so different than the one in his faded pre-war memory, he's grateful to avoid Brooklyn for now. Washington Heights is busy but quiet, with brick apartment buildings and old steel fire escapes, laundromats and bodegas and kosher delis and restaurants. No one gives Bucky a second glance as he walks down Audobon Avenue until he finds Sam's building on a side street tucked between the Avenue and the Harlem River Park. It's early evening and the sun is low on the horizon. He buzzes the intercom for apartment 3H.

No response. It's possible Sam is out. Or training. Or on a mission. He hadn't told him he was coming back. Should things go awry or Sam not want him here he can just leave again. Go back to Sokovia, or Algiers. Pegase would still have work for him. It's not hopeless.

Then a familiar gruff voice through the static of the intercom. "I swear, Mike, if you lost your key again and you need me to kick in your door I'm not gonna do it, I keep telling you you need to get on the leg press or just learn to pick the lock, man!"

"Hey, Sam."

"...Bucky?"

The door buzzes and unlocks. As Bucky starts climbing the stairs and he hears a door above slam open and footsteps rushing down.

Sam appears on the landing above him. He's wearing sweatpants and a tank top, bare-footed on the dirty stairs. He looks stronger, but looser, less chronically tense. He looks down at Bucky with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide. "You didn't tell me! I just put a letter in the mail!"

"It'll come back here. I filed a change of address," Bucky says from the landing below.

"Change of address?"

"I-- I thought I would stay a while, if that's still okay--"

Sam bounds down the stairs between them and wraps Bucky in a hug so hard it makes him drop his duffel bag. "Yes, you idiot, didn't you read my letters? Of course you can stay. Stay forever."

"Okay," Bucky says, and he tucks his face into the crook of Sam's neck, grips his shirt tightly.

Sam crowds him against the wall of the stairwell then leans back enough to see Bucky's face. They're still nearly flush and it's making Bucky dizzy with a flood of gratitude and hope and desire. Sam pulls the beanie off Bucky's head and runs his hand through Bucky's hair. "This looks good," he says. "You look good. You look... content. Or... fulfilled? Maybe just jacked. One of those things."

"Digging holes for months will make you jacked," Bucky says and his voice sounds very quiet to his own ears. His right hand finds the back of Sam's neck, squeezes there. "I really fuckin' missed you, Sam."

Sam's eyes close and he tips his head forward so their foreheads touch.

"You got me?" Bucky asks, his eyes still open, drinking in Sam's face, watching as Sam's lips quirk into a slight smile.

"Yeah. Yeah, I got you."

Bucky tilts his head slightly, closes this distance between them, and kisses Sam.

He feels a shiver run through Sam's body and then Sam presses closer, one hand in Bucky's hair and the other wrapped around his waist and tugging him close. He kisses Bucky like breathing, like it's second nature. Closed off from the world, between the wall behind him and Sam's strong body surrounding him, Bucky feels something inside him tense and then release long and slow like an exhale. Sam's kisses are deep and gentle and exploratory and his mouth travels easily along Bucky's jawline, to the delicate place behind his ear, down the column of his throat to where his neck meets his shoulder and Sam lets his teeth brush against the skin there, which makes Bucky's head tilt back towards the wall with a shuddering sigh.

"You like that?" Sam breathes.

"I like you," Bucky manages.

Sam pulls him impossibly closer.

Heat unfurls in Bucky's chest. His mouth finds Sam's again, hungry, his hands sliding under Sam's tank top to press against the smooth skin of his lower back. They kiss until they're both breathless.

"Gabi's upstairs," Sam says, slightly apologetically. "It's pizza night. She moved to Jersey. She's officially recruited. I can kick her out."

"What? No. I want to see her," Bucky says.

Sam grins at him, slides his thumb across Bucky's swollen lower lip, then smooths down Bucky's hair and recovers his beanie. "She'll know what we were doing. She's observant."

"I don't care. Do you care?"

"I'd tell the New York Times if I thought you'd let me," Sam says.

"I'd let you," Bucky says, and Sam laughs, picks up Bucky's duffel, and leads him upstairs.

 

"I'm not gonna be the Widow, ever," Gabi says, over a slice of margherita pizza. "Banner has me doing a sort of reduced Iron Man thing, where it's a super light, less protective exoskeleton, sort of. Allows for some skill enhancement and weaponry but with speed and freedom of movement."

"Like a cross between Nat and Tony," Bucky says, glancing at Sam, who shrugs and nods.

"It's too much pressure if you describe it like that," Gabi says. "I need my own call sign."

"Like what?" Bucky asks.

"If you say a bug I'm kicking you off the team," Sam says.

"I don't know," Gabi says.

"What was your call sign in the Marines?"

"Ugh, I don't want to talk about it."

"Athena," Bucky says, suddenly.

Sam raises his eyebrows. "That's pretty good."

"You don't think naming myself after the goddess of war is kind of presumptuous?"

"She's also the goddess of wisdom," Bucky says. "I think suits you."

"Athena it is," Sam says, and claps his hands.

"I was glad you're back," she says, waggling a slice of pizza at Bucky, "Now I'm not so sure."

Over pizza Bucky tells them about Algeria and Sokovia and his life with Wanda. And Sam tells him about the new facility in Jersey, the missions, working with the remaining Avengers and slowly pulling together a new team. He looks confident and comfortable, and Gabi adds to his stories with a tone of deferring respect and admiration.

As the night winds down, Bucky walks Gabi to the door and follows her into the hallway.

"I really am glad you're back, Sergeant," she says.

"Me too," Bucky says. "And I'm glad you're up here. This job will suit you."

She grins, an odd mix of glee and ferocity. "I think you're right," she says. "Take care of Sam now, okay? He's working too much. He's been lonely."

"I'm no good at taking care of people," he says. "But I'll try."

"Doubt that," she says. "Later."

"Bye, Athena."

He hears her cackling as she descends the stairs.

When Bucky steps back inside, Sam's in the apartment's small kitchen, washing dishes. "She threaten you a little bit?"

"No," Bucky says. "Remember, she was my friend first."

"So was she threatening me?"

Bucky laughs and starts bringing the rest of the dishes from the living room into the kitchen. Sam tosses him a dish towel. "You dry," he says.

He stands next to Sam, their hips bumping together as they wash and dry the dishes and put them away.

"So," Sam says. "Do you think you found what you were looking for? In Sokovia?"

Bucky hums.

"We don't have to talk about it," Sam says.

"No, it's not that. I'm just thinking."

Sam nods and lets him think.

"Steve and I, we had a... Turbulent friendship. Intense. Plus, I loved him for a long time. You know, distantly, unrequited. And I was okay with that. So when he dropped that bomb on me at the lake I guess I just broke. I was already on the brink of it from the wars. And then ... And then there was you. And the way I started to feel about you wasn't... It was untenable. I was trying to erase myself. Lose myself. Dedicate myself to you like I did to Steve. That's no way to live."

Sam is watching him, his hands frozen on a dish, looking concerned and horrified.

"So that's why I left. And I figured it out. How to be a person. I hadn't really been independent for a long time. You know, it was war with Steve, then I was brainwashed, then on the lam with Steve, then under supervision in Wakanda, then war with Steve. Then you."

"I never really considered that," Sam says, carefully.

"It was good," he says. "Making my own way."

"So how do you feel now?" Sam asks. "About us. I don't want to, I don't know, be a reminder of something bad. Or. I don't want to.. I mean, with Steve..."

"You don't want to be second best," Bucky says.

Sam laughs darkly. "When you say it like that."

"Sam." Bucky abandons his dishes, leans back against the counter, and tugs Sam close by the waistband of his sweatpants. Sam catches his balance, his arms braced on the countertop at Bucky's hips. "I'm over a hundred fucking years old. Steve was around for most of it. He was my family. All the family I had for a long time. So. I'll probably always feel that loss. It's a unique situation." Sam huffs an uncomfortable laugh. "But if I really wanted to I could go to Banner and ask him to boot up the time machine and send me to Steve's timeline. Just abandon this world like he did and go back to trailing his heels."

"But?" Sam asks.

"But I don't want to," Bucky says, and he keeps his left hand on Sam's waist, the other on Sam's cheek. "I want to be here. With you. You're why - You're showing me I can be - I can have -" He scowls, searching for words, and Sam is patient, turns his head into the palm of Bucky's hand and kisses it. "That I can love someone in a way that doesn't hurt so bad," Bucky finishes, quietly, lamely.

Sam's soft dark eyes bore into his own. "You love me, huh?"

"Yeah," Bucky says, and he lets himself smile now, slightly, ducking his head down, his cheeks flushed. "Yeah. I guess I do."

"Good," Sam says, "'Cause I definitely love you. And you know I miss him, too. You don't have to carry that alone."

 

The next morning Bucky wakes in Sam's bed. They'd crashed uneventfully, Bucky exhausted from travel, Sam from the shock of Bucky's appearance. Bucky lies close to Sam, his face tucked into the crook of Sam's neck, inhaling the rich smell of him, soap and shaving cream and sweat.

Sam hums a low growl deep in his chest as he wakes up and gathers Bucky in his arms. "Hey," he says. "Good morning."

Bucky kisses him, regardless of stale morning breath, kisses him deep and proper.

"Oh," Sam says against his mouth, "It's like that?"

"It's like that," Bucky says, and Sam rolls them over so Bucky's on his back with Sam above him grinning radiant. Bucky grabs the back of Sam's neck, pulls him down for another kiss, long and luxurious and lingering. His hands skate down Sam's back, dipping into the waistband of his boxer-briefs, then sliding over his ass and pulling him close. Sam responds with another growl, dropping down so they're pressed flush together, chest-to-chest, and he drops kisses and gentle bites on Bucky's neck. Bucky sighs deeply in pleasure, letting his body sink deep into the mattress and Sam's hand runs down his side, tripping along his ribs, then settles on his hip. Bucky squeezes Sam's ass again, and it makes Sam laugh against his chest, then Bucky rolls his hips up purposefully and the laugh turns into a shuddering murmur. 

"That's right, baby, do that again," Sam says, and Bucky does, shifting his hips up so his cock presses against Sam, and he feels Sam bare his teeth against Bucky's chest. "Yes, like that, baby. Good boy."

That makes a shiver run through Bucky's body. "Sam," he hums. "Fucking missed you. Dreamed about this."

"Yeah?" Sam slides up, kisses Bucky again, drawing back to look at Bucky's face, to smooth a hand through Bucky's hair. "What'd you dream about?"

"Kiss me again," Bucky says.

"Don't wanna tell me?" Sam says, but kisses him anyway, rolling his hips down, making Bucky gasp and sigh into the kiss.

"This is better than any dream," Bucky manages.

"Can I touch you?" Sam asks, and Bucky hisses, "Fuck yes," and Sam laughs and slides a hand into Bucky's shorts.

Sam rolls off him, onto the bed next to him pressing the length of his body to Bucky's. Bucky's got his shorts pushed down just below his cock and Sam's eyes travel hungrily over his body, watching his hand on Bucky's cock, watching Bucky's face twist and contort, watching his back where it arches off the bed. Heat roars through Bucky's body, through his veins like liquid. Sam's hand is strong and soft and gentle, jerking him off slow and steady, smearing Bucky's precome down his cock. It's so good, so comfortable and safe and hot and good and Bucky feels like he might cry from it. "So good, baby," Sam murmurs, kissing Bucky's cheek and shoulder. "So good for me. Can I blow you?"

The question makes Bucky gasp, and he reaches out to pull Sam close to him and kiss him deeply. "Yes, God," he says, "But I won't last."

Sam wriggles down Bucky's body, over his hips, and sucks Bucky into his mouth without warning. Bucky arches up hard, his hands scrabbling in the sheets until Sam's left hand finds his own, and Bucky's right hand goes to his own hair just for something to grip.

He babbles Sam's name, and when he looks down and sees Sam's mouth on his cock, his eyes open and gazing towards Bucky, still crinkled like he could laugh joyously with just his eyes, Bucky comes so hard his vision goes fireworks behind his eyelids.

Sam slides back up the bed, next to him, and he's jerking himself off and planting soft kisses on Bucky's face, neck, shoulders, chest. The aftershocks of his orgasm have Bucky moving slow, but he gets his hand on Sam's cock and grips it tightly, and oh it's big and hot and so hard in his hand, the sensation enough to make Bucky draw his lower lip in between his teeth and make his cock twitch with interest.

Bucky turns his head and kisses Sam again, licking the taste of himself from Sam's mouth, and Sam shudders violently. "Show me how you like it," Bucky says.

"That's right, baby," Sam says into his mouth, and places his hand on top of Bucky's, guides him in jerking him hard and fast, until they're sharing breath just gasping into each other's mouths, and Bucky's other hand grabs Sam's ass and pulls him close, squeezing hard, and then Sam's biting Bucky's lower lip as he comes hard across their hands and Bucky's hip.

"I love you," Bucky says, impulsively, and he's rewarded with Sam's smile breaking like a sunrise as he takes Bucky's face in two hands and kisses him gentle and sweet.

"I was so hopeful you'd come back," Sam says. "I bought a bunch of Hanukkah decorations so we can celebrate. You know it starts on Christmas this year."

He feels that feeling again - the tensing and releasing, like a breath, or an orgasm, or a lowering tide. And unexpectedly he begins to cry. Sam panics, eyes widening, but Bucky just waves him off, and finds himself laughing through the release of tears, and tugs Sam close and manages to say, "I'm just surprised. And happy. You remembered."

 

Darlene drives up for the holiday, braving the spitting grey snow. When she arrives on Christmas Eve Bucky answers the door, taking her bag but dropping it when Darlene surprises him with a hug.

"It's really good to see you," she says.

"You too," Bucky stammers. He shows her to the second bedroom, still unused.

"So you and Sam worked it out?" she asks as he places her bag on the bed.

Bucky feels his cheeks flush. "He-- did he--"

"Yeah," she says. "I'm happy. Are you?"

"Yes," Bucky says, immediately, feeling nervous, exposed.

She grins and nods once, like that settles it. "Great. Let's make some latkes."

Even though Hanukkah doesn't start until tomorrow they have latkes with their roast dinner anyway, and they're a little overcooked on the outside and a little cakey in the middle but they taste like Bucky's childhood. They sit in the living room and eat and laugh. Bucky shows Darlene the Christmas card they'd received from Missouri - Wanda and the Bartons in matching overalls, each with a toy bow and arrows. 

On Christmas morning they have jelly donuts from the kosher deli for breakfast. Darlene gets a new bike saddle from Bucky, and a very large and intimidating book of educational theory from Sam. Bucky gets an almost-large-enough Kingman Elementary School sweatshirt from Darlene and a membership to the Washington Heights bike co-op from Sam. ("It includes shop use! So you can use the actual bike stands instead of just flipping them upside down!") Sam gets a new pair of running sneakers from Darlene, which he is thrilled about, and a beat up first edition of Gil Scott-Heron's record _Winter in America_ from Bucky.

The day passes slow and easy with the snow spitting down. They watch _Home Alone_ and _Die Hard_ and listen to Gil Scott-Heron and cook more latkes and eat more jelly donuts.

In the solitude of their now-shared bedroom Bucky lingers by the door and watches Sam strip off his shirt. He doesn't think he will ever tire of seeing the easy fluid way Sam moves, the comfortable grace in the strength of his body.

"Thinking loud again there, Barnes," Sam says.

"I got you another present," Bucky says.

"Two presents?! Ain't I spoiled."

"It's not - it's not really a good present."

"I'll be the judge of that." He ambles over to Bucky, pulls him in for a kiss easily.

They kiss for a long moment, easy and slow, then Bucky pulls away. "You're distracting me." Sam laughs.

Bucky shoulders past him and roots around in the closet for a moment before finding his beat up old notebook and flipping to the back. "I know the letters I wrote you sometimes seemed kind of, uh, robotic."

"It was better than no letters at all," Sam says with a shrug.

"I was nervous about writing you," Bucky says. "Didn't know how to say what I wanted to say. The only time I just kind of wrote without thinking was the last one I sent you."

"That one was my favorite."

"But I wrote a lot of ... versions. Drafts of letters. If you wanted to ... I don't know. Read the originals. And see." Bucky knows he's bright red now, offering these letters to Sam like his diary. He feels suddenly foolish, childish. A stupid idea. 

Sam takes the stack of letters with something like awe. "You're serious?"

"You don't have to read them," Bucky says. "A lot of them are crazy and rambling."

Sam thumbs through the stack rapidly, his eyes tracking speedily, hungrily across Bucky's narrow scratched out handwriting. Bucky remembers some of the things in those drafts: _Dear Sam, I dreamed about killing you again. Dear Sam, if I think about you too hard it makes me cry. Dear Sam, I'm not alone here but I feel alone and I think the only person I can talk to is you but only in this way, from far away. Dear Sam, am I beyond saving? Dear Sam, I think I'm figuring out how to live._

Sam sets the letters down and pulls Bucky onto the bed, onto his chest, and Bucky listens to the steady beating of Sam's heart for a long time.

 

In the cold, wet, miserable days of early March, 2025, Bucky goes with Sam to the third Avengers facility, underground a nondescript warehouse outside Paterson, New Jersey.

"You need a new call sign," Sam says as they drive west on I-80. "Winter Soldier doesn't fit."

"Why can't you just call me Bucky, then? Or Sergeant, like Gabi does?"

"We gotta match thematically. It can't be Captain America and Athena and Ant-Man and _Sarge._ "

"I think that sounds cool."

"You're a hundred, you don't know what cool is."

"You're a grave robber, then."

"No, _you're_ a cradle robber!"

Bucky laughs, leans back in the passenger seat and watches Sam adjust his sunglasses and glance over at him. He's reminded then suddenly of their first drive together, leaving the lake house, driving towards DC. "So?" Sam says. "What's it gonna be?"

With a heaving, defeated sigh, Bucky says, "In Wakanda they called me White Wolf."

"Now that's more like it! Captain America and the White Wolf. Totally sexy."

"There's no 'the'. It's just White Wolf."

"The White Wolf. Mysterious. Yet... intoxicating."

"Change it back to Sarge."

"Never."

Sam parks the car outside the rundown warehouse and they walk inside and take a heavily secured elevator deep into the earth. Inside the facility is bright and white and gleaming like the destroyed upstate facility, just, hidden.

The doors to the training facility slide open and Bucky has just enough time to hear someone cry his name before he has his arms full of Wanda Maximoff. He grins and spins her around, lifting her off her feet, and she laughs.

"Wanda," he says. "You're here."

"Finally, I know, I got caught up at the farm. But I had to convince some people to come check out the place, too."

"I know, I know," Clint says, stepping towards them. "I'm fickle. Always in and out. This time I'm just here to help train the rookies, okay?"

"Clint," Bucky says. "You're well?"

"As well as can be expected. Certainly better than I deserve. You?"

"About the same."

The space is set up as a large sparring facility, with mats and targets, and a control panel that allows for different exercise programs. He and Sam ignore all the fancy stuff and move towards the open space in the center of the room. Gabi pauses in showing Scott the new improvements to her Athena suit in order to hoot and holler.

"Did you know they call him White Wolf in Wakanda?" Sam calls to Gabi.

"Sounds like he made it up," Gabi calls back.

"If I made it up it would be Sarge," Bucky says as he warms up. "Ask Shuri about it." Gabi laughs.

Sam's in his snug, slightly padded drill suit, and he grabs his training gear - no wingsuit, just a vest to simulate its weight, eye protection, and the timeless, unchanging vibranium shield. Bucky glances back at him and the sight of it takes his breath away. He looks confident, loose and easy in the white and navy suit, and the shield seems at home on his arm.

He looks like Captain America.

"All right, Teen Wolf!" Sam calls. "Let's show 'em how it's done!"

They spar, fast and elegant and easy, like dancing. Sam takes him to the ground and gets him in a chokehold. Sam's mouth is very close to his ear, and everyone is watching, and Sam says, "You good?"

"Yeah," Bucky says, breaks the hold with a grin and flips them so he's got Sam pinned. "I got you."

From the ground Sam smiles at him, so blindingly open and sweet. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, you do."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for taking the time to read this fic. I so enjoyed writing it and I am grateful to be creating in this fandom again. Please if you have a moment leave me a comment or a kudos as they really are a bright spot in my day.
> 
> Epigraph is from Paths to Transformation by Kate Burns.
> 
> The song Bucky remembers George Formby - It Serves You Right. The movie didn't actually come out until the 40s but I fudged the dates. The Little Carnegie did show Formby movies, though.
> 
> Sam refers to Bucky as Underground Man, a reference to the title character from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, which is also the chapter title.  
> The Russian translates to: "Where is the motorcycle?" / "You call me that, then I speak Russian."  
> The poem Bucky quotes is Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth.  
> Sam quotes Gil Scott-Heron's Whitey on the Moon.
> 
> Chapter 3 title comes from Robert Frost's The Death of the Hired Man.
> 
> I realized (belatedly!) that my interpretation of Bucky draws elements from [Not Easily Conquered](https://archiveofourown.org/series/115516), specifically Bucky working at the docks pre-war, and the "tear the world apart" kind of love. The influence of a great fic!
> 
> find me on [Tumblr.](http://bayonetbarnes.tumblr.com)


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